Power, Culture, and Materiality in Modernity

Abstract

decision to split ‘relational’ from ‘material’ power. Morgan asks whether a re-fused material-relational account of power might not continue to serve us well in highlighting one of the necessary economic features of the various global transitions to modernity. Emily Erikson chooses to interrogate Reed’s identification of the body metaphor as constitutionally significant to modernity, questioning how this metaphor applies in nonEuropean contexts, and highlighting the exclusionary implications it holds. Stephen Kemp’s review is interested in how Reed’s work might be seen as a development of his earlier writing on the place of hermeneutics in the social sciences. In particular, he is interested in the degree to which Reed’s latest book can be read as expressing a continuity with his earlier preoccupations with understanding society in terms of meaning, interpretation, and process, as opposed to the constraining influence of an external ‘social structure’ existing ‘out there’. Kemp suggests that this new book occasionally risks treating meaning as though it were such a reified social structure, rather than the variable and contingent product of a sequence of interactions. Monika Krause raises several important critical points of her own. Amongst them, she questions whether the theoretical term ‘exclusion’ adequately captures all the various ills and victimisations produced by the exercises of social power Reed identifies. Krause also senses some ambiguity over whether Power in Modernity should be read as an analysis of a particular social sphere – the specific sphere of political power – that assumes a broader theory of a differentiation of spheres, or whether his account of power should be taken as a critique of such differentiation theories altogether. Leonidas Tsilipakos takes up the issue of how Reed builds on Ernst Kantorowicz’s work, singling out analytically the various methodological, theoretical and conceptual choices that provide for the claim that ‘the King’s second body’ eternally recurs. His review appreciates the scope of Reed’s work but remains circumspect as to its (or any work’s) ability to adequately synthesise such a broad sweep of ideas and arguments, and, further, to handle the clash between historicist and formal theoretical modes of inquiry. As readers will discover, in his reply to critics, Isaac Ariail Reed, has chosen to helpfully restate the intent of the book as well as the scope of its argument and to engage with and defend against some of the critical issues this introduction has itemised.