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Resisting Left Melancholy
Abstract
boundary 2 - Volume 26, Number 3, Fall 1999
... Wendy Brown (1993Brown ( , 1999Brown ( , 2002Brown ( , 2009) has something to offer on the political risks of psychoanalytical melancholy as well. She identifies Walter Benjamin as a conservative, melancholic figure who commits to the traditionalist left, despite its failures, because of a melancholic commitment to the lost object. ...
... Wendy Brown (1993Brown ( , 1999Brown ( , 2002Brown ( , 2009) has something to offer on the political risks of psychoanalytical melancholy as well. She identifies Walter Benjamin as a conservative, melancholic figure who commits to the traditionalist left, despite its failures, because of a melancholic commitment to the lost object. ...
... One way that this intense focus manifests is in political movements that seek affective resolution-an end point, like justice, catharsis or security. Such curative or reparative politics are frequently of concern in gender and sexuality politics, and this is in part why my discussion is embedded in that space (Brown 1993;Love 2009;Munōz 2009).To speak about these sensations though, is to speak about a subjective narrative with a given conclusion. If I am to stake a position here, then, I want to caution against affective resolution, against seeking a 'cure' that is dependent on a narrow set of concepts or objects. ...
There is a conceptualisation of melancholy that is often evoked in gender and sexuality studies, but it is rarely well-defined. With affect theory's prominence in gender and sexuality scholarship, it is important to consider a more rigorous understanding of bad feeling--especially melancholy. This argument identifies Adorno's 'proto-affective' theory--which he referred to as a 'melancholy science'--as some of the earliest work to contend with the crises of modernity and the ways in which marginalised subjects were made to suffer. This valuable history, however, may have been lost in contemporary theories of affect. This thesis aims to address this underrepresentation of melancholy by merging the scholarship of Adorno and contemporary critical theorists, with key scholars of affect in gender and sexuality: Sara Ahmed, Heather Love, Lee Edelman, and Lauren Berlant. By closely reading these scholars, I develop an understanding of melancholy as an affective orientation toward the world that allows marginalised subjects to maintain emotional distance from cultural objects that may have the potential to harm them. Further, I contend that melancholy--far from being an abject state--might represent a healthy orientation toward the world that can help one cope with the uncertainty of the present age.
... At least since the end of state socialism, the capacity of critical theories to imagine transformative political action and political alternatives has been widely scrutinized (e.g. Brown 1999;Harvey 2000;Gibson-Graham 2006;Bargetz 2019;Bargetz and Sanos 2020;Mrovlje and Zamalin this volume). Instead, a loss and lack of political vision within contemporary critical theories has been acknowledged, echoing the "pervasive . . . ...
... Critique seems to enforce two particular, yet equally unsatisfactory, temporal political modes: on the one hand, it is too invested in an unimaginable future; on the other hand, critique's negative structure of affect proves inadequate for its orientation towards the past. Regarding the latter, Wendy Brown's (1999) critique of "left melancholy" has been influential. In view of the collapse of state socialism and the inheritance of Marxism, she criticizes a backward-looking, self-pitying melancholic left, whose dwelling in a lost past and desire for "past political attachments" (Brown 1999, 20) stands in the way of any "critical and visionary spirit" (26). ...
... Left melodrama is for her an expression of a melancholic attachment to the Communist Manifesto pervasive among the Western European and North American left. In my adaptation of her approach, I am more directly concerned with the latter aspect of melancholy derived more directly from Freud and Walther Benjamin's subsequent critique of left-wing melancholy, as well as other political theorists (Benjamin 1974;Brown 1999;Dean 2012;Nunes 2021). ...
This article interrogates the ways in which two political books written by elites in the Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan (CDP) take different tacks to represent their party as trustworthy, responsible, and competent against the background of the liberal opposition's political difficulties since 2012. Focusing on two books published in the lead-up to the 2021 general election by former Prime Minister Kan Naoto and then-leader of the CDP Edano Yukio, it argues that the liberal opposition parties in Japan are, on top of the more commonly understood institutional pressures, constrained by demands that the narrative is a conventionally satisfying one when crafting claims about their viability as an alternative to government.
... In either case, group members internalise the overall group difficulties as their own failure. This phenomenon has been observed in the global justice movement and is sometimes referred to as "leftwing melancholia" (Brown 1999;Nunes 2018;Traverso 2016). ...
Collective action failures are often attributed to inadequate organisation and leadership. Protest movements – including recent state-level protests and revolts, from the “Arab Spring” to the square occupations and Black Lives Matter, and transnational ones like the World Social Forum and recent expressions of the environmental movement such as Fridays for Future and Extinction Rebellion– have been arenas of conflicts over organisational structures and leadership. Activists consider leaders along a spectrum from representatives of the group interests, values and identity, through seductive manipulators of individuals and discourses, to illegitimate undemocratic usurpers. Some activist collectives reject leadership’s emancipatory claims and (cl)aim to prefigure horizontal political relationships. For others, leaderlessness (re)produces structures of domination that cause the collapse of collective action. I propose that a) groups appoint leaders (formal or informal) when they feel unable to ensure their survival (due to oppression, challenges to lifestyle or livelihood) or to prevent the spread of unbearable feelings (helplessness, frustration, anxiety), b) leaders do not (mostly, often at all) represent the group’s conscious will, but its underlying emotions and beliefs, and c) leadership and individual autonomy are inversely proportional and so are leadership investments and group-wide political creativity. Drawing on critical leadership studies and the psychoanalytic study of groups, I introduce some aspects of the relationship between leadership and anti-leadership and, on the other hand, politics and anti-politics. The argument presented applies to any group, formal, informal and unconscious.
... Thus, as various authors have argued, people identifying as (radical) left-wing are confronted with a two-fold difficulty: In addition to individual experiences of power-and helplessness they are also confronted with a long history of political failures that have pushed emancipatory visions to the margins of political discourse. According to Brown and Traverso, this has led to the emergence of the phenomenon of "left-wing melancholia," that is, a vague collective feeling of loss, doubt and defeat that can become a distinct source of suffering (Brown 1999;Traverso 2016; see also Postone 2006). The danger of left-wing melancholia, they further argue, is that it can create the desire to simply repress this unpleasant feeling. ...
... was later expanded as a political-ideological term of 'left melancholy' by Western left intellectuals and theorists such as Walter Benjamin (1974Benjamin ( [1931), Wendy Brown (1999), Jodi Dean (2012) and Enzo Traverso (2016). Moreover, the Freudian therapeutic connotation of 'melancholia' has later been significantly reinterpreted by Judith Butler (1997), with a rediscovery of an affective agency in her theorization of subjection. ...
As the fin-de-siècle New Leftist champions of revolution, Zhang Guangtian, Huang Jisu and Shen Lin struck a melancholic note with their collaborative play Che Guevara (Qie Gewala) (2000-1) on the postrevolutionary, depoliticized Chinese stage. Why do these Chinese theatre-makers still carry on ‘left melancholy' amid the worldwide postrevolutionary arena that has bid ‘farewell to revolution'? Whose memories and histories do these artists attempt to reclaim and retrieve through this melancholy? How do affective and Marxist theories of ‘left melancholy' expand the perceptions of recurrent revolutionary pathos in post-revolutionary Chinese leftist theatre? How does the play's radical recuperation of leftist theatrical techniques, in turn, reinterpret ‘left melancholy' and resist the marketized, depoliticized trends? This article attempts to depart from and expand the current academic focus on ‘left melancholy', which has been largely confined to Western leftist theorists such as Walter Benjamin, Wendy Brown and Enzo Traverso, to the postrevolutionary Chinese context. Integrating Western theories with Chinese interpretations of the concept by New Left scholars such as Wang Hui, along with Judith Butler's theory of subjection (1997), I argue that Che Guevara extends the connotation of left melancholy as a ‘performative paradox’ between an existential, passive despair and a radical, active aesthetic agency of hope to counteract the depoliticized trend of commercial theatre, through an exploration of its affective, theatrical and ideological significance.
Key Words: left melancholy; Chinese New Leftist theatre; Che Guevara; collective creation; living newspaper
... Precarity has historically been the norm for labor relations, while post-World War II, Global North, full-time male employment supported by welfare benefits, is merely a historical exception (Munck 2013). Therefore, uncritically maintaining the ideal of full-time dependent employment and decent jobs as a blanket claim for all workers' struggles around the globe is an example of what Wendy Brown (1999), drawing on Walter Benjamin's writings, has termed as left melancholy. Here, I side with Brown's and other contemporary scholars' reasoning, claiming that a progressive contemporary social and economic requirement is to question waged work as an overall system of exploitation (e.g., Millar 2017). ...
Digital labor platforms have proliferated worldwide over the last fifteen years, creating what is widely known as the gig economy. The growth of the gig economy has sparked international debates at social, regulatory, and academic level in relation to (mis)classification of employment relations and algorithmic management of workers. Especially regarding location-based platforms, emerging literature demonstrates and describes the prevalence of migrants in their labor force and the implications stemming from this fact. The Danish gig economy is a remarkable case within this global setting, due to several particularities of the Danish social, political and economic environment. These include the traditional regulation of the labor market through collective agreements between the social partners, and the existence of a universal welfare state, coupled with restrictive migration policies. This thesis is a case study that engages with the phenomenon of housecleaning platform labor in Denmark, analyzing it as an outcome simultaneously shaped by three different factors: a) workers’ livelihood strategies, b) platforms’ affordances and performative aspects, and c) policymaking and regulations on labor market, welfare and migration issues.
Research on domestic work and housecleaning platforms has been explored less intensively compared with other platforms. The invisibility of platform housecleaners in the public sphere creates practical and methodological obstacles to conducting fieldwork. The relative absence of platform housecleaners’ experiences and practices in international literature is therefore a subject I address while bringing cleaners’ voices to the forefront of debates on platform work in Denmark. This thesis adds new insight to the literature by drawing on twenty-three interviews with – predominantly female and migrant – platform housecleaners, nine interviews with stakeholders, digital ethnography in housecleaners’ social media, policy document analysis and other forms of desk-based research.
The analysis of my findings commences with demonstrating the migrant identity of cleaners, which I subsequently argue is the most defining trait of platform housecleaning in Denmark. I contend that platform housecleaning is a precarious form of work that unfolds on the basis of a double – often unfulfilled - promise. Platform companies promise unhindered flexibility to cleaners, and platform workers promise themselves that this work will be only temporary. By delving deeper into workers’ practices, I describe the ways in which they resist exploitation by platform companies and customers, and reveal how they navigate restrictive regulatory frameworks, welfare exclusions and minor algorithmic management by platforms. Finally, I examine the role of the Danish state and its institutions over time in promoting platform housecleaning. Despite providing a lifeline for migrants in urgent need of income, platform housecleaning in Denmark exacerbates labor market inequalities and augments insecurities for its workforce. Thus, platform housecleaners experience imperfect presents and uncertain futures.
... The broad disillusionment in the promises of redistribution of access, socioeconomic opportunities, and social justice releases the energies that are easily appropriated by nationalist and populist leaders. This disillusionment also finds expression in 'left-wing melan-cholia,' Walter Benjamin's concept that has been used by cultural theorists more recently in critiques of contemporary closures of political horizons (Brown 1999, Traverso 2017. Between and beyond these trajectories lies a landscape of multiple variations on discontent, disappointment, and ambiguity (expressed in statements such as 'a transition was necessary, but this is not what we expected it to be'). ...
... Needless to say, action being replaced by nostalgic idealism is so fundamentally against the foundation of Marx's work that he would have completely disowned these melancholists. Brown (1999) further explains that clinging "to the formations and formulations of another epoch, one in which the notion of unified movements, social totalities, and class-based politics appeared to be viable categories of political and theoretical analysis" makes the melancholic left a conservative and traditionalist force (p. 25). ...
Since the 20th century, socialism and socialist utopian thinking have come to be associated by many with ideas of authoritarian rule, totalitarianism, and in general, suppression of human rights and dismissal of individuality. As a result, socialist utopias have lost their power to mobilize people and inspire large-scale social movements. Given that utopia or imagination of an alternative society is critical for mass mobilization, this thesis attempts to end the staticity and melancholia of the left by reconciling a contemporary understanding of socialist utopia with individuality and human rights. The framework of the main argument is based on the principle that human rights, particularly those recognized and enshrined in International Human Rights Law, have become the dominant discourse that inspires social movements, and individuality has to be protected accordingly. Thus, for socialism to be able to remain relevant as a major political ideology, it has to embrace the liberal discourse of human rights, particularly in protecting individual rights and freedoms. This thesis also argues that while essentially rooted in political
liberalism, liberalism in the economic sphere (i.e. neoliberalism) prevents the state from comprehensively respecting, protecting, and fulfilling human rights principles. By reviewing socialist utopias throughout history, negating the Marxist position on the lack of need for individual rights in a society freed from class conflict, and analyzing the compatibility of the defining conditions of a socialist utopia with human rights principles (including but not limited to the controversial right to property), this thesis argues that socialism has both the space and the need for recognition of human rights, and goes beyond to claim that not only is socialism
compatible with human rights, it is only through socialism that human rights can be protected and fulfilled comprehensively. On the other hand, it is only through embracing and deliberately emphasizing the protection of human rights that socialism can inspire a desirable utopia that appeals both to those who prioritize justice and those who prioritize liberty.
... 10 The crisis of the global Left was analyzed by Wendy Brown's in her Resisting Left Melancholia where she argued that in neo-liberal times what emerges is a Left that operates neither with a substantive critique of the status quo nor a substantive alternative to it: perhaps even more troubling, it is "a Left that is thus caught in a structure of melancholic attachment to a certain strain of its own dead past, whose spirit is deathly, whose structure of desire is backward-looking and punishing". 11 Instead of preserving a melancholic attachment to the past, Jude's films criticize the problems of Romania's society such as the underfunding of public education and the underlying antisemitism of many public discussions. In doing so, Jude's attunement to the present signals a capacity to understand the utilization of film on phones and social media which can serve as a springboard for a novel form of critique. ...
Scholars of Romanian cinema (Parvulescu & Turcuș 2021) explored the topic of nostalgia in post-socialism, but they stopped short of analyzing why directors such as Radu Jude refuse to draw on a melancholic view of the past. Similarly, film critics (Gorzo & Lazăr 2022a; Ferencz-Flatz 2017) analyzed the importance of the Jude’s attunement to contemporary cultural forms, but they did not engage with his reluctance to discuss positive aspects of Romanian state socialism. By putting two apparent opposite readings of Radu Jude’s films in conversation, this article investigates Jude’s philosophical technique which I conceptualize as “the construction of a dialectical image”. I draw on films such as I do not care if we go down in history as barbarians (2018), Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn (2021) and the short film The Potemkinists (2021) to distinguish between a dialectical and a nostalgic use of the socialist past. I concentrate on three main topics: Jude’s interest in capturing the materiality of the present, which he borrows from Siegfried Kracauer’s cinematic materialism; the differences between Walter Benjamin’s dialectics and Jude’s cinema; and the use of comedy in The Potemkinists. My article adds to previous work on Jude’s cinema (Parvulescu & Turcuș 2021; Gorzo & Lazăr 2022; Ferencz-Flatz 2018) a discussion about the uses of nostalgia in Romanian film, a subject that has not been discussed in relation to experimental and avantgarde productions.
... In this context, momentary gains, losses, and the strategies that led to them need to be investigated against large-scale, long-term reorganizations that made it possible for the system to survive. Instead of necessarily leading to a state of "left melancholy" (Brown, 1999), which Bailey and his colleagues warn us against (2017: 4), I see this kind of awareness as a necessary condition for thinking about movements' potential in today's moment of crisis, when the threat of climate catastrophe makes a full transformation of the system the only realist scenario of "winning". ...
... Most notably, Walter Benjamin (1974Benjamin ( [1931) accused his contemporaries in the Weimar era of 'left-wing melancholy' -an attitude that according to him reduced 'revolutionary opposition into objects of aesthetic appreciation' (Pensky, 1993: 10). After the Cold War, Benjamin's charge was used anew to describe the resignation among leftist intellectuals who felt they had failed to realise the utopian aspirations of socialist revolutions across the globe (Brown, 1999;Traverso, 2016). ...
The aim of this cumulative Habilitation is to explore the political-sociological implications of the assertion, that we're confronted not so much with a ‘climate crisis’ as the latest episode of the overall breakdown of modernity and the notion of progress. In the introduction I first review a small but highly significant literature on ‘the end of progress’. I then associate key tropes of this literature with melancholy as the quintessential end-of-progress sentiment and suggest that attending to it is exceptionally useful for the re-examination of democratic politics in the era of environmental deterioration. For such re-examination to work, however, I argue that melancholy needs to be reclaimed as a collective, non-Eurocentric form of resistance. In the third part of the introduction, I offer a summary of the individual papers of the Habilitation and through a series of empirical cases spell out how a reclaimed version of melancholy may help us articulate political sensitivities that I collectively refer to as melancholy democracy. Finally, I briefly discuss how this ‘turn to melancholy’ resonates with ongoing discussions about affect and the status of critique in the social sciences.
... Uma discussão do conceito e das suas iterações históricas é feita porBrown (1999),Traverso (2017) eGordon (2017). ...
Tradução de: Azmanova, A. (2019). The paradox of emancipation: populism, democracy and the soul of the Left. Philosophy and Social Criticism, 45 (9-10), 1186-1207. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/0191453719872291. Traduzido por Ivan Rodrigues Que conexão há entre o vagalhão populista e a queda do apoio eleitoral às tradicionais posições ideológicas à esquerda? Como podemos explicar o declínio da esquerda sob condições que deveriam estar catapultando-a para o poder? Argumento que a esquerda, na sua reação tanto à hegemonia neoliberal como à ascensão do populismo, está afetada pelo que Nietzsche chamou de “preconceito democrático” – o reflexo de ler a história como o advento e a crise da democracia. Em decorrência disso, a esquerda tenta agora recuperar a democracia por meio da ressurreição do conjunto de políticas de crescimento-e-redistribuição característico da “era dourada” da social-democracia nas três décadas após a Segunda Guerra Mundial. Esse gesto nostálgico, todavia, está levando a esquerda a outro impasse, àquilo que chamo de “paradoxo da emancipação” – ao lutar por igualdade e inclusão como condições essenciais da cidadania democrática, a esquerda está validando a ordem social no interior da qual ela está buscando igualdade e inclusão, a saber, a ordem social moldada pela produção concorrencial de lucro, a qual é a causa básica pela qual as nossas sociedades se encontram encalacradas. Concluo a análise propondo a construção de uma contra-hegemonia contra o capitalismo neoliberal mediante o alargamento do enfoque da esquerda, de modo a que a esquerda não se restrinja às suas preocupações tradicionais com a desigualdade e a exclusão, mas dê conta também da injustiça da crescente insegurança social e econômica – um dano cujo alcance vai além dos trabalhadores pobres. Uma agenda reformulada de justiça social que tenha como eixo questões de insegurança econômica que atravessam a “clivagem de classes” possibilitaria à esquerda mobilizar uma ampla coalizão de forças sociais para a transformação radical e duradoura em direção à democracia socialista.
... Although conventionally understood as a pathological response to loss, for chto delat, melancholia can offer a political alternative to normative forgetting or even amnesia. This recuperation of melancholia as a productive and even critical relation to the past reframes accusations of leftwing melancholia (Brown 1999) as being "stuck in the past" as an opening to consider alternatives to what is now. ...
From November 2017 to April 2018, in Mexico City’s MuseoUniversitario Arte Contemporaneo, the Russian artistic-activist collectivechto delat (what should be done?) exhibited a number of monuments inmemory of the Russian revolution. In centring on three monuments, in thisarticle I consider the ability of the collective’s monuments to inspire politicalmediations on historical potential embedded in revolutionary pasts. I arguethat melancholia does not inevitably mark historical fixity or unaccomplishedmourning, but rather a temporal openness to mnemonic productivity andsolidarity. It is in this sense that melancholia does not index a pathologicalresponse to loss, but a political alternative to normative mourning. Inrecuperating melancholia as a potentially productive and critical relation to thepast, chto delat reframes accusations of left-wing melancholia as being “stuckin the past” as an opening to consider alternatives to what is now.
This essay examines the effects of the structural suppression of solidarity initiatives with Palestine. It does so by theorizing the conceptual framework of the "stretch marks on the soul." For the purpose of the essay, such stretch marks of the soul are conceived as an archive of pain and struggle, but also of collectivized striving, the apprehension of which provides resources which may help us overcome the impasse produced by the suppression of solidarity.
המחאות שהתעוררו בקיץ 2020, שהצטיירו כפרץ מבוזר ואקלקטי של התנגדות אזרחית, התלכדו מאחורי דרישה פוליטית נחרצת אחת. הסיסמאות המלוות אותן – ״הם הייאוש, אנחנו התקווה״, ״דור שלם דורש עתיד״ ו״לילה טוב ייאוש, בוקר טוב תקווה״ – סימנו את התקווה כטובין הפוליטי העיקרי שעליו נסוב המאבק נגד שלטון נתניהו וכמסר הצלול ביותר שלו. המאבק על התקווה, שהמחאות הללו היו נקודת השיא שלו, נדמה כתגובה מתבקשת לתחושת התקיעות, השיתוק והייאוש ששורה בשנים האחרונות על השמאל והמרכז הפוליטי בישראל. אך האם הפוליטיקה של התקווה יכולה לעמוד בהבטחתה לחלצנו מהמבוי הסתום? ועל מה בדיוק מעידות הכמיהה הרחבה לתקווה, והפיכתה של העמדה הרגשית הזאת מאמצעי לקידום מטרות פוליטיות לתכלית העומדת בזכות עצמה? המאמר מבקש לדון בשאלות הללו באמצעות פנייה מהשיח הפוליטי שחותר לעורר את התקווה אל היצירה השירית שעוסקת בחסרונה. ״זמן התפוז״, אלבומה של רונה קינן שיצא במרץ 2019, מתעד את המלכוד הפוליטי והרגשי שבו שאלת התקווה כולאת אותנו כיום, ומבהיר מדוע הפוליטיקה של התקווה אינה יכולה לפרוץ אותו. בעזרת האלבום הדיאגנוסטי של קינן, המאמר מסרטט דיוקן של חיים במבוי סתום שבו התקווה והייאוש גם יחד הם תחושות שאיננו חשים, ומצביע על הצורך לפתח עמדות רגשיות אחרות ביחס לעתיד, שפורצות את הניגוד המשתק בין שתי אלה.
The Paintbrush Factory was a vital cultural centre in Cluj, Romania, that operated as a cooperative run by visual and performance artists. It produced and showcased art and performance for thirteen years, until its shutdown in 2022. That same year, I attended the emotionally charged book launch of Creativitatea-marfă (Creativity as Merchandise) written by Miki Braniște, one of The Paintbrush Factory’s main managers and curators. I employ the case study of the Factory and build on Braniște’s account of its institutional history against the background of municipal, national and European cultural policies to discuss the crisis of artistic production and artistic imaginaries under neoliberalism. I build a counternarrative to the implicit story fuelled by the neoliberal social imaginary that denies the possibility that theatre-making can put up a fight against its own commercialization. I show how in the neoliberal city, even radical performance projects serve gentrification policies that use artists’ work to help convert a post-industrial city into an urban landscape of deepening inequality. Given the dominance of economic logic exerted over the current social imaginary and the conflation of politics with business, I propose that the most artistically fruitful partnerships that artists can build are not with the public or private sector, but with marginalized communities.
Wendy Brown is recognized internationally as one of the most important contemporary critics of neoliberalism and for her crucial contribution to feminist political theory. In this dialogue, Brown traces her intellectual itinerary, from her provocative and polemical relationship with the classic authors of political theory, to her confrontation with Marx and Foucault as both indispensable sources for the critique of neoliberalism; from the problem of political subjectivation in the age of identity politics, to the new reactionary politics which challenge feminism as a political discourse and practice. The text is a transcript, elaborated and revised by Brown, of the dialogue she had with her interviewer and the audience at the masterclass held on 13 March 2024 at the University of Trento, as part of the second series of lectures “Voices from Contemporary Philosophy”, coordinated by Tiziana Faitini, Alessandro Palazzo and Michele Nicoletti
The article deals with contemporary war history, the aesthetics of resistance, and the politics of affect in the context of the post-Yugoslav space. Looking back at the armed wars of the 1990s, as well as the numerous wars still being waged by other means, it becomes clear that there is still no peace in this exhausted zone of geopolitical discomfort. The politics of (non)belonging to this space has oscillated for decades between conflicting affects, liminal zones, and the (im)possibilities of overcoming the permanent production of war through lasting peace. This ambivalent feeling of (non)belonging has led to various twists and shifts in post-Yugoslav art that have solidarized within the old and new geopolitical zones of discomfort and war(s). Using the post-Yugoslav art-based research of Adela Jušić and Blerta Heziraj, who are now involved with the Antifašistički front žena—AFŽ (Women’s Antifascist Front), as well as a long-durée activist performance by Žene u crnom (Women in Black), the text accordingly points to a common ground of politics and art that uncompromisingly resist the governing (post-)Yugoslav discourses of never-ending wars.
Ken MacLeod’s Fall Revolution quartet (1995–99) is widely known for its “polyphonic” style of utopia-building. In these works, MacLeod creates a space that welcomes all kinds of possible societies in which everyone can find their niche. He focuses his novels on two particular societies—Norlonto and New Mars, both libertarian anarchies. This article argues that in this quartet, MacLeod resorts to Robert Nozick’s conceptualization of “meta-utopianism” and “minimal state,” introducing not one true utopia, but a horizontal plane where all forms of social ideology are given their moment to be tested out. In this way, the Fall Revolution quartet is written against the political transition in the UK from the 1970s to the 1980s and then the 1990s—a critical response to the discourse of historical exhaustion and the lingering influence of Thatcherism.
To refer to Sweden as a good example of care and welfare reforms has been common among many US scholars all through the 1990s until today. In this article, the author tries to understand why the Swedish pandemic strategy during 2020–21 was met with surprise and confusion, most visible in the US where the political divide between for-or-against lockdown, that is, for or against free access to public spaces, made the right-wing refer to Sweden in positive terms. In Sweden it was the extreme right-wing party, the Swedish Democrats (founded by neo-Nazis), that expressed an explicit belief in complete lockdowns, while in the United States it was the Democrats and the liberal left.
Tarkastelen artikkelissani KOM-teatterin 40-vuotisjuhlaesitystä KONE (2010). Analysoin, miten esityksessä käsiteltiin teatterin omaa historiaa: miten teatteriryhmän oma ja sitä sen perustamisen aikaan ympäröineen liikkeen visuaaliset, auditiiviset ja keholliset tunnusmerkit heijastuivat esityksen nykyhetkeen. Tutkimus osoittaa, että esityksessä teatterin historiaa lähestyttiin kahdensuuntaisen ajallisen kokemuksen kautta: sekä menneisyyttä suoraan kuvaamalla että tulevaisuutta visioiden, jolloin itse asiassa tuotiin esiin myös jo toteutuneita kehityskulkuja.
This article documents the roundtable “Unfamiliar Archives,” which took place as part of a two-day event to mark twenty years of Cultural Politics. Drawing from a range of “archives in the making” related to activists, artists, social theorists, and digital media practices, the participants reflect on the political, ethical, and epistemological provocations offered by their specific archival encounters. In particular, the participants reflect on the way their experiences of negotiating archives were inflected by their own initial unfamiliarity with the norms and protocols of archival research. To conceptualize these experiences, the participants orient their discussion around three terms that, they suggest, are generative for evoking the cultural politics of contemporary archives: estrangement, secrets, and loss.
The failure of the project of socialism in the twentieth century led to what can be designated as a loss of horizon of expectations. People are increasingly focused on the present, and the future, if considered, is more as a source of fears and uncertainty, and not as an opportunity to implement human aspirations and projects. Various methods of “privatization” of their living space lead to escapism from more global social projects. Even the very idea of utopia becomes privatized as part of the current state of affairs. Thus, there is a crisis of ideas about the future, which calls into question how humanity will develop in the future. In this situation, the discourse about the future among modern leftists acquires important values for possible social changes that can be available to society. In addition, how these concepts affect the ideas about a person and his place in a socio-political system also play an important role. This article tries to reconstruct the current state of utopia in the left social and philosophical discourse. For this, an analysis of such socio-political concepts as “left melancholy”, “utopia as education of desires” and “real utopia” is carried out. The conclusion is made of varying degrees of relevance and importance of these concepts for society as a whole and a person in particular.
How can the world be improved if the people inhabiting it do not believe they can transform it? A belief in such political fatalism is an important obstacle to social transformation, yet underexplored in the contemporary political theory literature. Political fatalism can be understood as a commitment to the belief that human agency cannot effectuate social transformation. In this article, I provide a typology of such political fatalism, considering its two main forms: fatalism of inevitability as the positive version that humans do not have the power to affect positive social change, and fatalism of impossibility as the negative version that human agency does not play a role in avoiding negative social change such as climate catastrophe. Focussing particularly on the more pressing contemporary problem of the fatalism of impossibility, I develop three distinct dimensions along which fatalism has an impact: the cognitive, the affective, and the practical. Finally, I offer solutions, focussing on how to combine interventions on the cognitive, affective, and practical levels: historically sensitive critique, imagination, and a combination of bounded spontaneism and long-term political organisation.
“Hafızayı Dekolonize Etmek: 68 Hafızası, Sait Kırmızıtoprak ve Hüseyin Cevahir” adlı makale, Dipnot Yayınları tarafından 15 Aralık 2023’te yayımlanan Kürtler ve Cumhuriyet başlıklı kitabın bir bölümünü meydana getiriyor. Bu makale, Türkiye'deki 1968 kuşağının karmaşık hafızasını, Sait Kırmızıtoprak ve Hüseyin Cevahir gibi iki önemli figür üzerinden inceliyor. Bu hafızanın çoklu, melez ve çatışmalı yapısını daha iyi anlamak için post-kolonyal bir perspektif öneriyor. Makale, Kırmızıtoprak'ın tartışmalı ve bir anlamda arafta kalmış mirası ile ancak Kürtlüğü ve Aleviliğinin şekillendirdiği kimliğinin üstünün örtülmesi ve kimliğini kuran bu öznelliklerin bireysel/psişik yapılara indirgenmesiyle Türkiye solunun hafızasında kendine bir yer bulan Hüseyin Cevahir'in hatırasını karşılaştırıyor. Bu makale, Kırmızıtoprak ve Cevahir'in nasıl hatırlan(ma)dığına odaklanarak, Türkiye'de Kürt kimliğinin tanınması ve hatırlanmasında yaşanan yapısal zorlukları vurguluyor. Bunu yaparken Kürtlüğün yalnızca siyasal alanda yasaklı olan bir kimlik değil, neyin hatırlanıp neyin unutulacağını dayatan egemen hafıza rejiminin belirleyici bir unsuru olarak ortaya çıktığının altını çiziyor. Ölüm, "makbul" unsurlar içerisinde yer alırsa hafızanın başat bir köşe taşı olabilirken, o hafızaya uymayan bir ölümün unutulması hafızanın devamlılığı için zaruri hâle gelebiliyor.
Wendy Brown is a political theorist best known for her critiques of power in contemporary political orders. Her research examines how various forms of power obstruct democratic politics, entrench economic inequality, and inhibit desires for freedom and democracy. Her work integrates three main vectors of political theory: Frankfurt School critical theorists, who combine the work of Marx and Freud to examine the cultural, structural, and psychological reasons why people do not revolt against domination; Michel Foucault's analysis of power, via Nietzsche, in which power does not only repress but produces ideas, institutions, and political subjects; and Sheldon Wolin's pressing of canonical political thought to examine the difficulties of democratic politics under capitalism. Brown reworks their insights to argue both that unfreedom is often the effect of the very political formations supposed to enable freedom.
Wellbeing has emerged as an important discourse of management and organisation. Practices of wellbeing are located in concrete organisational arrangements and shaped by power relations built upon embedded, intersecting inequalities and therefore require critical evaluation. Critical evaluation is essential if we are to reorganise wellbeing to move beyond critique and actively contest dominant wellbeing narratives in order to reshape the contexts in which wellbeing can be fulfilled. The COVID-19 pandemic under which this special issue took shape, provides various examples of how practices continue to be shaped by existing narratives of wellbeing. The pandemic also constituted a far-reaching shock that gave collective pause to consider to the extent to which work is really organised to realise wellbeing and opened up potential to think differently. The seven papers included in the special issue reveal the problematic and uneven way in which wellbeing is pursued and examine possibilities to imagine and realise more radical practices of wellbeing that can counter the way in which ill-being is produced by the organisation of labour.
This article examines the Ukrainian electro-folk band Go_A and their multimedial performances of “SHUM” created for the 2021 Eurovision Song Contest. We highlight how Go_A’s performances feature an aesthetics of ecstasy and melancholia despite ongoing damage within Anthropogenic late capitalism. We compare two versions of the song, exposing critical contexts for the group’s local, transmedial, and international reception. Informed by musicological, eco-critical, post-humanist, historical, and feminist frameworks, our analyses meander through exploratory patches employing concepts such as borderland epistemologies, interspecies connectivity, the gaze, and hyperobjectivity. These juxtapositions reveal how, rather than the sensorial experience of radioactivity as hyperobject, “SHUM” promotes ecologically attuned survival strategies such as the re-integration of “wild” singing styles and ecstatic rituals. “Survival” is understood hereby as a form of resistance that evades the pitfalls of neoliberal resilience. Ultimately, through a participatory aesthetics, Go_A’s multimedial performance of “SHUM” invites audiences to imagine a regenerative ecology of survival in the damaged post-apocalypse.
Retrospection and transformation of the phenomena of criticism and crisis in
social theory in recent decades have led to the weakening and even
“illegitimate” renunciation of the said doublet. The paper presents an
analysis of the renewal of discourse on criticism/crisis and its effects
with special consideration of the possibilities of structural criticism. We
included several authors of recent analyses as well as the viewpoints that
have led to reconsideration of historical and analytical dynamics of two
categories, structure and conjuncture, as a form of analysis of current
structural processes in terms of structural analysis and criticism. The
paper comprises three parts. The first part is a reflection on the reason
criticism and crisis have been subjected to different processes of
derogation despite their original connection. In the second part, we show
the effects of different ways that crisis has manifested itself in
capitalism and explain its dispersive and “non-punctual” modalities. The
third part raises the question of chances of reuniting the crisis and
“immanent criticism” based on structural criticism, and we further
articulate its connections with immanent criticism. Structural criticism is
viewed as a connection between immanent criticism and transcendent
orientation that is focused on the reconnection between crisis and
criticism, the elements related to capitalism.
If the world seemed to be in crisis when this paper was first presented in Autumn 2019,1 then it is safe to assume that we are in a worst place today. To the dual crises of the Anthropocene and the global financial crisis, we must add the spread of global viruses, a result of the extension of capitalism into previously pre-capitalist enclaves (Davis, M. ‘The Monster Enters’ in New Left Review, 122, March–April 2020.), and the recent IPCC report on global warming. Jameson’s famous dictum that it ‘is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism’ (Fisher, M. Capitalist Realism: Is There Really no Alternative? Zero Books, 2009.: 2) feels even more relevant.
Este análisis teórico busca analizar, por una parte, en la inmersión de la obra del pensador galés Raymond Williams y, por otro lado, el acercamiento a lo que podemos denominar como Estudios Culturales Británicos, una propuesta metodológica y política plausible en virtud de pensar nuestro presente con una mirada y una sensibilidad diferente a lo que ampliamente se ha caracterizado como «presentismo» o futuros cancelados. Para ello, retomar la obra de un pensador parcialmente olvidado en las últimas décadas, no solo nos permitirá atisbar posibilidades de pensar futuros diversos, sino que nos obligará a tomar en consideración una caja de herramientas, sugerente, que terminó defendiendo con matices, contradicciones e incorporaciones hasta el final de su vida en 1988.
Using the case study of the 2020/21 Strajk Kobiet [Women’s Strike] protests in Poland, this project looks at the relationship between research(ers) and social movements, the blurred line between artist and activist, and the purpose of archiving within a protest wave. What renderings are effective when research needs to exist in a close loop with the streets? Is the role of the artist during a protest wave to disseminate awareness or knowledge, and inspire, or can artistic research be a form of knowledge-development, and therefore a rendering of the research to further political goals and develop political strategies? What is the role of the archive?
Against a backdrop of digitised-mediatised politics and a fascistisation of politics globally, this research looks to address an urgent need for dynamic renderings and more structured looping of research, arts, archiving and the streets in the fight for better futures. Posing more questions than offering answers, this exploratory process comes from a personal intersection of academic investigation and activist practice.
Man sagt, die Sieger*innen schreiben die Geschichte. Wie also wird die Erinnerung an die Kämpfe der Arbeiter*innenbewegung nach 1989 erzählt? Dominieren Verfallsgeschichten und eine »linke Melancholie« oder entfaltet sich in der Erinnerung an das Gewesene ein Möglichkeitsdenken, das auch die Zukunft neu zu perspektivieren vermag? Sebastian Schweer analysiert engagierte deutschsprachige Erinnerungsromane, in denen die Arbeiter*innen- und Bewegungsgeschichte archiviert, kritisiert, reflektiert und weitergesponnen wird. Der Frage nach dem Verhältnis von Romanform, Erinnerung und dem Status utopischen Denkens folgend behandelt er Sujets wie Hausbesetzung, Terrorismus, das Erbe der DDR oder sozialistische Kybernetik.
As the world suffers the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic, global justice activists pursue political solutions to its devastating consequences especially on the weakest sections of the world’s population. I analyse activists’ responses to the 2008 financial crisis to reflect on how collective action is impacted by social crises. The global justice movement and the financial sector face recurring, intertwined, and inversely related cycles of exuberance and crash. I find that, on the one hand, the prevalence and intensity of recurring crises in large transnational collective actors depend on factors including their prevalent emotional dynamics, their dispositions towards their objectives, and their ability to gauge external reality. On the other hand, differential outcomes of crises in groups are accounted for by the capacity to mourn the losses suffered, as opposed to the denial of responsibility and the externalisation of blame. I analyse these emotional dynamics through psychoanalytic lenses to provide a contribution to the literature on the cycles of collective action and, more broadly, to the study of political action and social change.
This latest work by Robert Reiner completes what seems to me a triptych, a galvanizing journey in which the author embarked about 15 years ago and is now provisionally concluding with Social Democratic Criminology. The new text he is offering us extends the arguments of Law and Order: An Honest Citizen’s Guide to Crime and Control (2007) and Crime: The Mystery of the Common-Sense Concept (2016). I use the word text on purpose, as it derives from the Latin verb texere, to weave, and this is what Reiner does: he weaves the facts he presents with the concepts he elaborates and, in doing so, traverses the fallacies of dominant law-and-order approaches (2007), discusses the ‘arcane’ nature of criminological concepts (2016), to finally address crime as a concern that transcends conventional criminology altogether.
The three books mentioned display, of course, a high degree of intertextuality, in the sense that they are linked through continued reference to common topics and resonant ideas, but Social Democratic Criminology constitutes a decisive leap into the field of political and civic engagement that all criminologists might want to welcome or even decide to imitate. From a certain perspective, the book describes democracy as it operates now and democracy as many would like to see it operating. The title and content are courageous, as they evoke philosophies and socio-political arrangements that have long been banned from public debate. Reiner’s Social Democracy claims not only the legacy of Rosa Luxemburg but also the political right to expose the dysfunctions of contemporary democratic systems. Think of the incessant centralization of power, the expansion of plutocracies and the failure to build an emancipated, egalitarian and sustainable future. Think of how contemporary democracies keep denying their own principles in order to allegedly defend themselves; how, in brief, their resources for self-correction are extremely poor. It seems to me that Social Democracy, in the way Reiner proposes it, contains a set of values that may stop current democracies from de-democratizing.
This article explores the intersection of hydropower development and Indigenous rights within the context of climate governance. A historical rift between dam supporters and opponents has evolved into a contentious ebb and flow of dam proposal-resistance between hydropower industries and Indigenous communities around the world. Conflicts have recently intensified as dams are promoted as a climate mitigation strategy and are increasingly encroaching on Indigenous territories. Research analyzes a case study in Costa Rica, where an Indigenous-hydropower cycle emerged from a 50-year feud between the national electricity institute (Instituto Costarricense de Electricidad or ICE, pronounced E-say) and the Brörán peoples over development of the Térraba river—each time the state proposed a dam, the Brörán peoples defeated it, and another would emerge in its place. In this article, I ask why dam building continues despite the multitude of critiques and documented negative social-ecological impacts of hydropower projects. To address this question, I introduce the adaptive cycle, which serves as a heuristic model to investigate how and why the cycle continues, as well as to understand the power, justice, and equity issues involved in climate decision-making processes. Through a political ecology framework, I assess the hybridity of interrelated social-ecological, political, and economic factors encompassing the human-water nexus, conceptualized as a hydrosocial territory. Analysis suggests a rigidity trap that spans across multiple scales of governance causes the cycle to repeat, and given the current acceptance of hydropower within the climate governance arena, the cycle is likely to continue.
Apresentamos um diagnóstico, sugerido pela cientista política Jodi Dean, segundo o qual a categoria psicanalítica de “melancolia” pode ser usada para interpretar a resignação de determinados segmentos da esquerda assujeitados ao capitalismo ocidental. Então, o assumimos como referência de análise para ensaiar, em associação ao campo da economia política, uma interpretação histórica de três momentos da recente trajetória da luta de classes — a ascensão do Estado de bem-estar no pósguerra, sua queda e o programa neoliberal de austeridade —, refletindo sobre os lugares que certa esquerda veio ocupando ao longo dos mesmos. Guiamo-nos pela hipótese segundo a qual as posições de “reformismo” socialdemocrata e de “neoliberalismo de esquerda” sejam exemplos de resignação, em graus variados, à estrutura capitalista e à ideologia dominante. Nosso objetivo é refletir sobre desafios para a assunção de uma concepção de mundo revolucionária na política, introduzindo o conceito psicanalítico de melancolia como uma referência teórica relevante para análises nesta temática — debate que também se situa no campo da subjetivação política.
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