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Atopia Awaits! A Critical Sociological Analysis of Marxs Political Imaginary
Abstract
Marx’s (1844) estranged labor manuscript maps processes that stultify spontaneous human relations under the division of labor in the regime of capital accumulation. For Marx, negating absolutes would put ‘Man’ back on its natural trajectory toward positive freedom. Such evacuation of mediating ‘substances’ results in either frivolity or pragmatic barbarism rather than positive freedom. Marx’s political imaginary rejected philosophical mysticism but overlooked finer points of Hegel’s dialectic that contribute to an immanent critique of Marxist political ideology. Missing from Marx’s thought is the logic of post-capitalist mediation and a trace of the subjective modalities that correspond with the objective forms of alienation. Lacking an adequate psychology, Marx did not see that he had constructed a communism that mirrored the subjective spirit of bourgeois society. We draw upon philosophical, sociological, and psychoanalytic currents to remap the genome of Marxist political philosophy with a Whitmanesque imaginary congenial to free, poetic social mediation.
... Some recent Marxist scholars have tied Durkheim to Marx through the centrality of alienation (Worrell and Krier, 2018). From this perspective, capitalism produces a set of relations that sort families into particular ways of being premised on their relations to the means of production. ...
... From this perspective, capitalism produces a set of relations that sort families into particular ways of being premised on their relations to the means of production. In Worrell and Krier's (2018) view, these ways of being are isolating enough that, even if individual families are able to practice rituals ascribed to a different social location (e.g., working class parents enrolling children in structured, ECAs) they still are not able to overcome the social distance between classes in order to counter the forces of alienation intrinsic to the capitalist mode of production. ...
... This same capitalist structure permits working-class families to provide their children with much more control over their time but simultaneously limits the children's ability to compete in a social structure consisting of institutions operating from middle-class ways of being. In this sense, the capitalist structure includes cultural frameworks that reproduce class inequalities (Lotz, 2018;Salerno, 2018;Smith, 2018;Worrell and Krier, 2018). ...
When theorizing differences in action between structurally unequal groups, sociologists often disagree over the roles that structure, culture, and resources play. It is not uncommon for debates to arise in which structural explanations for unequal outcomes are pitted against cultural ones, with the former pointing to group resource disparities and the latter emphasizing differences in how groups think and do things. In this article, we develop a theoretical approach that conceptualizes culture as an element of social structure and draws on Sewell’s multiplicity of structures and Bourdieu’s habitus to theorize group differences in action as structural. This approach, we argue, advances a structural sociology of stratification that helps counter the tendency for U.S. individualism to promote interpretations of group differences/disparities as having individual-level rather than structural-level sources.
... Marx (1844Marx ( /1978 postulated that workers experience four aspects of alienation: estrangement from the product of their labour; estrangement from the process of their labour; estrangement from their species-being (i.e. their distinctively human ontology); and estrangement from one another (see also Worrell and Krier, 2018). Harvey (2018) has added that under today's neoliberal capitalism, we are also alienated from the dominant political structures (and, subsequently, daily life) which are made to work for a small ruling class (see also Long, 2017). ...
... Mouzelis (2014) goes on to note that, for Marx, we can traverse alienation through understanding how ideology distorts reality whereas, for Lacan, the subject weakens (although never fully eliminates) alienation when signifiers are connected to symptoms. In drawing from Marx's (1844Marx's ( /1978 four aspects of alienation, Worrell and Krier (2018) attempt to explicate how each is implicated in Lacan's (1958-9) model of subjectivity, noting that alienation from the product and process of labour falls under subjective alienation from the symbolic order (e.g. the way that the legal language of employment becomes a tool for advancing capitalist oppression). Alienation from our species being and from others, therefore, falls under the subject's alienation from primary relations in the mirror stage. ...
In his pioneering work on liberation psychology, Ignacio Martín-Baró describes de-alienation as a subjective process of recovering fragmented historical pasts for the purpose of reconstituting and liberating ourselves from an oppressive, alienating present. In this article, I argue that although de-alienation is typically understood as a political concept, it also lends itself to psychoanalytic readings. To this end, I draw on Marxist notions of material alienation, as well as Lacanian conceptions of subjective alienation, to offer a psychopolitical interpretation of de-alienation. More specifically, I use Marx and Lacan to consider how liberation psychology work can advance de-alienating processes within political organising, the production of art, and knowledge creation. I conclude by urging those working within the liberation psychology paradigm to consider how other psychopolitical lenses might avail emancipatory insights into collective resistance.
... 11. Crucially, the abolition of alienation is not tantamount to the abolition of authority, since the latter leads to disaster, as this paper has shown (see also Worrell and Krier 2015). The abolition of alienation is not the elimination of authority, but, rather, authority's sublation (aufheben), such that authority is preserved but fundamentally transformed by being subject to rational and recognized control by the free and equal individuals who co-construct it through their social relations. ...
From postmodern to metamodern: the formation of modern visual practices
The purpose of the article is to trace the transition to metamodern as the dominant cultural logic of modern society. The article presents the development of the loft-style and art collage as examples of changes in modern visual practices. The authors demonstrate how the new cultural logic is reflected in the production of the art object space and urban environment generally. The purpose of the article is to demonstrate the similarity of the semiotics of loft design and the collage art, which reflects the emergence of a new cultural logic of metamodern.
The article presents the evolution of views on the state of contemporary culture in the framework of the concepts of postmodern and metamodern. The relevance of this study is associated with the formation of a new attitude to visuality in the metamodern concept. The proposed approach demonstrates a new principle of working with the phenomenon of visualization, both in terms of detail and generalization.
The authors explore the concept of a loft-style in the context of general trends in visual practices during the transition from the postmodern culture to the metamodern one. An analysis of the loft aesthetics makes it possible to see the development of postmodernism as a common worldview paradigm of the late twentieth century. In turn, changes in the loft-style technique become markers of the transition to the metamodern. The loft object demonstrates the layering of senses and meanings, historical eras and aesthetic preferences. The loft style reflects the influence of aesthetic, technical and communicative preferences on the formation of a specific human-environment paradigm.
A comparison of the loft-style and the collage art practices allows us to conclude about the post-modern art space practice and its implementation in an urban concept. This appears as a single process of development of the postmodern paradigm realized on a different scale. The loft and art collage techniques of the last quarter of the twentieth century served as the basis for the metamodernist technology for constructing the historicity (authenticity) of the environment. At the same time, an important moment in space is the entourage of authenticity, coupled with cutting-edge urban technology.
Metamodernism understands the visual image as a phenomenon of consciousness, inscribed in the complex system of interactions, where physicality, sociality, psychology, etc are present. Anthropological projections are conditions, not the means of expressing meanings.
The article proposes the original approach to the phenomenon of visualization: visual image is presented as a result of the formation of a complex semiotic system which reflects the experience of the multi-level spatial environment.
Key words: visualization, metamodern, space production, loft design, installation, collage.
It has been suggested that, today, with the growth of Right-populism and white nationalism, Western nations are haunted by the spectre of fascism. This article explores the consolidation of a ‘post-fascist constellation’, through attention to utopia. The argument proceeds by way of a discussion of utopia as method, beginning with a survey of the utopian turn across the human sciences, and closing with seven theses on utopia as human scientific optic. Turning to post-fascism, a five-featured ideal-type is outlined: organic, palingenetic, transcendent nationalism; conspiracy theory and cleansing; charismatic authority; counter-revolution or backlash politics; and militaristic masculinity. These strands are then brought together, in exploring the utopian dimension of post-fascism, drawing on the work of Ernst Bloch, in particular. The article closes with two suggested and somewhat contrasting theses: first, that post-fascism is loaded with utopian content, predominantly characterized by what Bloch called ‘the future in the past’; second, that, nevertheless, the utopian figuration of post-fascism is residual in comparison to the reservoir of variably-expressed fears found within this ideological ensemble.
In this article, I argue that Marx’s philosophy does not commit us to Worrell and Krier’s claim that a post-capitalist society will be a social formation in which all social relations appear unmediated to their agents. Quite the opposite is true: given his Hegelian background, which Marx never gives up, social relations are in principle to be mediated by the results of human productive acts, and although a socialist society no longer is mediated by capital, it still cannot be thought without a legal, ethical, and political form of these relations. Those meditations (which Worrell and Krier do not separate clearly from social-economic aspects) will be universal. Accordingly, the authors’ claim that Marx is opposed to the concept of the universal is baseless. In addition, I demonstrate that Worrell and Krier’s interpretation of Marx’s concept of alienation as a romantic concept is misguided and, instead, that we would do well to focus on the concept of private property. Finally, I show that they do not properly grasp Marx’s concepts of democracy and communism.
How did as small and backward a state as Prussia transform itself to compete successfully in war against states with far greater human and financial resources? Richard Gawthrop finds the answer to this perennial question in the creation of a unique political culture, in which service to the Prussian state took precedence over all other relationships and commitments. The campaign to inculcate the new ideology of disciplined energetic obedience to the state authority derived its moral vision and institutional forms from Lutheran Pietism, a German version of ascetic Protestantism strongly influenced by English Puritanism. This work describes systematically how the collaboration between Pietism and the Prussian state not only led to an increase in the latter's power but also laid the cultural basis for the subsequent political modernization of Germany.
Cambridge Core - Texts in Political Thought - Hegel: Elements of the Philosophy of Right - edited by Allen W. Wood
Megaspectacles are theorized as markets for a special economic object: trophies of surplus enjoyment. Attendees at megaspectacles were found to focus their activity upon trophy markets, trophy hunting and anticipated trophy display rather than spontaneous enjoyment of the staged event. Veblen’s theory of trophies as invidious objects, and insights from Goffman, Lacan and Žižek, are used to explain these counterintuitive findings. Trophies function as distorting mirrors, reflective surfaces in which viewers misrecognize the trophy owner’s apparent experience of legendary pleasures as their own dispossessed surplus enjoyment. Megaspectacles produce and sustain envy inducing legends and ritually load trophies with three forms of potential envy: status trophies (envy of symbolic prowess), action trophies (envy of imaginary risk taking) and trophies of jouissance (envious yet repressed desire for libidinal pleasure). Megaspectacles do not directly pleasure their attendees, but provide them with trophies of surplus enjoyment to disturb and disrupt the pleasure of others.
This book is the most detailed commentary on Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit available and develops an independent philosophical account of the general theory of knowledge, culture, and history contained in it. Written in a clear and straightforward style, the book reconstructs Hegel's theoretical philosophy and shows its connection to the ethical and political theory. Terry Pinkard sets the work in a historical context and reveals the contemporary relevance of Hegel's thought to European and Anglo-American philosophers.
The United States has been involved in many wars, sometimes for noble causes like defeating Nazism, and, at other times, it has compromised its own ideals, leading to a lot of soul searching and regrets. Some wars are celebrated as glorious achievements (World War II), some are ‘forgotten’ (Korea), and some are ‘ignored’ (Afghanistan). The current wars in the Middle East represent a complex interplay of motivations, challenges, and threats to America’s role as the world’s democratic leadership. In the case of Afghanistan, we find that during the Cold War the US defense and intelligence apparatus directly and indirectly created an incalculable number of radical extremists that have now turned their sights on their former benefactor. The invasion of Iraq represents a different calculus: under the multitude of rationalizations rests a simple political-economic case of a master nation punishing a disobedient subject. In this brief book, America’s relationship with war is explored with an eye toward changes in capitalism from industrialism to post-industrialism, America’s involvement in the Cold War, nuclear proliferation, terrorism, torture, culture, and ideology.
The chapter argues that in the Logic Hegel managed to discover the simplest form of existence of the real: the movement of affirmation through self-negation. As a consequence, he correctly presents the method of science as the systematic unfolding of the immanent life of the subject-matter. However, in so far as Hegel´s systematic dialectic begins with the simplest thought-form, his subsequent derivation of form-determinations unfolds a whole series of redundant categories which, from a materialist standpoint, correspond to the immanent necessity of pure thought only and do not express the inner movement of the simpler determinations of ´real material being´. The chapter further submits that an immediate reason behind that spurious starting point resides in his methodological procedure of ´extreme´ abstraction, which arbitrarily casts aside all particular determination until reaching a wholly empty universal. By contrast the chapter argues that Marx finds a materialist alternative to Hegel´s abstraction in dialectical analysis, which moves by searching for the more abstract or simple content of the concrete form he is immediately facing.
This essay assesses the central arguments of Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century. We note Piketty’s limited engagement with and active distancing from the writings of Marx. Piketty’s location within the disciplinary boundaries of academic economics seems to have profoundly shaped his surprisingly apolitical analysis. Engagement with the political dimensions of capital is further constrained to increase the book’s influence upon policy. We analyze important limitations to Piketty’s work that result from these disciplinary constraints. Important politically implicated concepts, problems, and approaches that relate to Piketty’s substantial empirical work are: labor process studies, research on speculative capitalism, and literature highlighting institutional and political determinants among varieties of capitalism.
The concepts of alienation and its overcoming are central to Marx’s thought. They underpin his critique of capitalism and his vision of future society. Marx’s ideas are explained in rigorous and clear terms. They are situated in the context of the Hegelian ideas that inspired them and put into dialogue with contemporary debates.
1820 Preface THE immediate occasion for publishing these outlines is the need of placing in the bands of my hearers a guide to my professional lectures upon the Philosophy of Right. Hitherto I have used as lectures that portion of the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophic Sciences (1817) which deals with this subject. The present work covers the same ground in a more detailed and systematic way. But now that these outlines are to be printed and given to the general public, there is an opportunity of explaining points which in lecturing would be commented on orally. Thus the notes are enlarged in order to include cognate or conflicting ideas, further consequences of the theory advocated, and the like. These expanded notes will, it is hoped, throw light upon the more abstract substance of the text, and present a more complete view of some of the ideas currant in our own time. Moreover, there is also subjoined, as far as was compatible with the purpose of a compendium, a number of notes, ranging over a still greater latitude. A compendium proper, like a science, has its subject-matter accurately laid out. With the exception, possibly, of one or two slight additions, its chief task is to arrange the essential phases of its material. This material is regarded as fixed and known, just as the form is assumed to be governed by well-ascertained rules. A treatise in philosophy is usually not expected to be constructed on such a pattern, perhaps because people suppose that a philosophical product is a Penelope's web which must be started anew every day. This treatise differs from the ordinary compendium mainly in its method of procedure. It must be understood at the outset that the philosophic way of advancing from one matter to another, the general speculative method, which is the only kind of scientific proof available in philosophy, is essentially different from every other. Only a clear insight into the necessity for this difference can snatch philosophy out of the ignominious condition into which it has fallen in our day. True, the logical rules, such as those of definition, classification, and inference are now generally recognised to be inadequate for speculative science. Perhaps it is nearer the mark to say that the inadequacy of the rules has been felt rather than recognised, because they have been counted as mere fetters, and thrown aside to make room for free speech from the heart, fancy and random intuition. But when reflection and relations of thought were required, people unconsciously fell back upon the old-fashioned method of inference and formal reasoning. In my Science of Logic I have developed the nature of speculative science in detail. Hence in this treatise an explanation of method will be added only here and there. In a work which is concrete, and presents such a diversity of phases, we may safely neglect to display at every turn the logical process, and may take for granted an acquaintance with the scientific procedure. Besides, it may readily be observed that the work as a whole, and also the construction of the parts, rest upon the logical spirit. From this standpoint, especially, is it that I would like this treatise to be understood and judged. In such a work as this we are dealing with a science, and in a science the matter must not be separated from the form.
As Fredson Bowers discovered, in 1858 or early 1859 Walt Whitman completed under the title "Live Oak, with Moss" a twelve-poem sequence that traces the course of a man's love for another man, their happiness together, and the aftermath of their relationship-a brave, albeit unpublished, homosexual manifesto. In Robert K. Martin's The Continuing Presence of Walt Whitman Alan Helms printed what he called "Live Oak with Moss" (without the comma)-not the original sequence Bowers had printed in 1953 but the twelve poems as shuffled and revised for "Calamus" (1860). Having reconstituted the original order with revised texts, Helms read a narrative of homophobic oppression, "a deeply trouble sequence, mostly about the confusion, pain, and fear that surround the fact of men loving men." The distinction between a correct text and an incorrect text of this Whitman sequence is anything but academic. "Live Oak, with Moss" matters because readers worldwide look to Whitman for guidance in living a sane and hopeful life. Given the immense difficulties that gay teenagers sometimes face in coming to terms with their sexuality, it would be tragic if even one young person found the shame-drenched asnwer in the no-comma "Live Oak, with Moss" instead of finding the frank, resolute answer in "Live Oak, with Moss" that Whitman wrote and that Bowers first printed.
May I remind you, Gerhart Hauptmann, that you were among the audience when I gave a lecture, at the University of Frankfurt during the Goethe-Week celebrations, about belief and education, or about humanity? You were seated in the first row, and the auditorium behind you was filled to the rafters with students. It was a lovely occasion, and I hope that this one today will prove likewise. In my imagination, I can see you before me now, just as you were then, and address you as a distinguished man on your birthday; and when I raise my glance a bit higher, I can also see the youth of Germany in the hall, listening attentively, for I want to talk to them again today, and also talk about them, and yet again talk with them, to borrow a phrase that appears in a locution such as "to have a bone to pick with them." I have to speak, in short: about you, whose birthday we're celebrating today, and about other, more wide-ranging concerns, or yet once again about issues concerning humanity—issues that will always receive a receptive response from German young people, or else they would cease to be German. True, it is possible that they will stamp or shuffle their feet in disapproval over what I'm about to say. But that will not matter: I shall persist and bend my heart and mind to the task of winning them over. For they have to be won over, that much is clear; and they are ready to be won over, for they are not evil, and even those who stamp or shuffle their feet are only a bit proud and stubborn.
To begin once again, it is not surprising that I remember with pleasure the events in Frankfurt and imagine you once more before me: undoubtedly, as I became aware only later (for in the present we never feel gratitude), they marked a high point in my life as a writer. You sat before me, Gerhart Hauptmann, as I have already said, and to your left sat Reich President Ebert. "Before king and kingdom," as Lohengrin says, "I truly unveiled my secret"—with the word "kingdom," it is clear, meant to designate Friedrich Ebert, while the word "king" refers to you. For today indeed you are a king—and who would want to deny it?—truly a people's king, as you sit there before me—the king of the Republic. Does that phrase entail a contradiction? I call upon Novalis, a royalist of a special sort, who once said that people everywhere would soon be convinced that no king could last without a republic and no republic without a king—a democratic expression in any case, and one that invites expansion with the observation that a republic could survive without a king longer than a king without a republic (feet shuffling in the background). One should not be surprised if you, Gerhart Hauptman, in your capacity as king, were to become a complete republican, for surely our republicanization has served to greatly strengthen and illuminate your kingdom—albeit after a brief wobble in your royal status during the time of revolution.
We live fast. The environment of each individual is changing in the blink of an eye; "today you're dead," runs a popular expression, "and tomorrow, until further notice, you're red." It's entertaining—and it is certainly no more than that—to look into the kaleidoscope of current affairs and values, especially insofar as our own moment of fateful choice is at stake. Intellectual radicalism, which accompanied the Revolution in the literary sphere, did not take kindly to a nature such as yours. Fashionable opinion was against you. But that mood has now passed. The younger voices that dismissed you as "unintellectual" are now mute; you stand on the crest of the wave, and the social as well as democratic trends of the time are suited to your greatness. The socialism of this moment reveres you as the compassionate poet of The Weavers and Hannele, the poet of the poor. And when everything that can be said about democracy has been said...
Preface to this edition, by Steven Lukes Introduction to the 1984 edition, by Lewis Coser Introduction to this edition, by Steven Lukes Durkheim's Life and Work: Timeline 1858-1917 Suggestions for Further Reading Original Translator's Note The Division of Labour in Society by Emile Durkheim Preface to the First Edition (1893) Preface to the Second Edition (1902) Introduction PART I: THE FUNCTION OF THE DIVISION OF LABOUR 1. The Method of Determining This Function 2. Mechanical Solidarity, or Solidarity by Similarities 3. Solidarity Arising from the Division of Labour, or Organic Solidarity 4. Another Proof of the Preceding Theory 5. The Increasing Preponderance of Organic: Solidarity and its Consequences 6. The Increasing Preponderance of Organic: Solidarity and its Consequences (cont.) 7. Organic Solidarity and Contractual Solidarity PART II: THE CAUSES AND CONDITIONS 8. The Progress of the Division of Labour and of Happiness 9. The Causes 10. Secondary Factors 11. Secondary Factors (cont.) 12. Consequences of the Foregoing PART III: THE ABNORMAL FORMS 13. The Anomic Division of Labour 14. The Forced Division of Labour 15. Another Abnormal Form Conclusion Original Annotated Table of Contents
The derivation of the name Moses from the Egyptian vocabulary and the divergence of the Moses legend from all others support the hypothesis that Moses was an Egyptian. If Moses was an Egyptian, he may well have been a monotheistic worshiper of Aton, a man of status who lost power with the overthrow of the 18th dynasty and of Ikhnaton, and who chose the Hebrews in Egypt as his people in order to promote his religion and found a new nation. Freud suggests such a hypothetical historical account as likely from the psychoanalytic implications of the legend of Moses and of the belief of the Jews that they are the chosen people. Freud also considers the possibility that Moses was murdered during the course of the Exodus, and he reasons that the Levite priests kept alive the legend, compromised with the followers of Jahve but kept the practice of circumcision and gradually made Jahve over into the God of Moses. Thus Moses created the Jewish character by giving the Jews a religion which heightened their self-confidence, kept them segregated, and opened the way to intellectual attainments by requiring further instinctual renunciations. These effects were produced only after a very long period and in a fashion analogous to the return of the repressed in the life of a neurotic. Freud considers the hatred toward the Jews to be a hatred toward Christianity displaced to the people who historically gave Christianity to the world. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Thesis (Ph. D.)--Indiana University, 1984. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 345-346). Photocopy.
The Symposium / Plato; translated with an introduction by Benjamin Jowett Note: The University of Adelaide Library eBooks @ Adelaide.
Attraction and repulsion I: Tropisms, laughter and tears
- G Bataille