Distinktion-Journal of Social Theory最新文献

{"title":"Theorizing is not abstraction but horizontal translation","authors":"Michael Guggenheim","doi":"10.1080/1600910x.2024.2304319","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/1600910x.2024.2304319","url":null,"abstract":"The literature on theorizing usually implicitly assumes that theorizing is writing. A recent focus on theoretical diagrams seeks to correct this idea. But even this focus on diagrams measures them ...","PeriodicalId":42670,"journal":{"name":"Distinktion-Journal of Social Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-02-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139770635","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Social figures as elements of sociological theorizing","authors":"Tobias Schlechtriemen","doi":"10.1080/1600910x.2023.2281233","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/1600910x.2023.2281233","url":null,"abstract":"Social figures are an inherently important but largely unnoticed element of sociological theorizing. Like other elements (such as metaphors, analogies, or diagrams), social figures have their own c...","PeriodicalId":42670,"journal":{"name":"Distinktion-Journal of Social Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-01-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139581675","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Rethinking political discourse in an ‘unhinged’ age","authors":"Michael Chisnall","doi":"10.1080/1600910x.2023.2273231","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/1600910x.2023.2273231","url":null,"abstract":"Where offered at all, current explanations of escalating political antagonism between right-wing extremists and progressives often rely on the idea that conflicting group opinions and beliefs have ...","PeriodicalId":42670,"journal":{"name":"Distinktion-Journal of Social Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2023-11-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138542792","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The biopolitics of fear: assessing Agamben’s analysis of the COVID-19 lockdowns","authors":"Paul Gorby","doi":"10.1080/1600910x.2023.2254010","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/1600910x.2023.2254010","url":null,"abstract":"This article provides a critical reading of Giorgio Agamben’s writings on the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown measures imposed by Western states. Taking the theme of fear to be central to Agamben’s interventions on this topic, it constructs a genealogy of the political theology of fear through The Book of Job to Thomas Hobbes and up to the work of Agamben. Contrary to readings which treat Agamben’s pandemic texts as examples of conspiracy theorizing, this article takes them seriously as works of political thought. Nonetheless, they ultimately fall victim to their own politics of fear: what Michel Foucault has termed ‘state-phobia’. Against this state-phobia, the article turns to Antonio Negri’s reading of The Book of Job in order to gesture towards a politics of solidarity grounded in a shared understanding of suffering which overcomes the weaknesses of Agamben’s interventions.","PeriodicalId":42670,"journal":{"name":"Distinktion-Journal of Social Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135993246","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"On heartbreak, livelihoods and art: affect and crip desire in art making assemblages","authors":"Kimberlee Collins, Chelsea Temple Jones, Carla Rice","doi":"10.1080/1600910x.2023.2250926","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/1600910x.2023.2250926","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACTThis article explores the affective dimensions of disabled, D/deaf, mad, and neurodiverse artists’ work through a livelihoods framework informed by the social and tacit dimensions of heartbreak. Heartbreak emerged during interviews with twenty artists in Canada in 2020, during a time of significant state-based policy changes that impacted disabled people’s livelihoods in the province of Ontario. Taken together, the artists’ stories form a rhizomatic cartography that takes crip wisdom and desire as significant elements of artmaking amid wider relational assemblages of affect. Drawing on Deleuzian and Guattarian concepts of desire and Puar’s difference-in/as-assemblage, researchers assert that although crip artmaking is not without joy, heartbreak is embedded in the politically aesthetic work of cultural production.KEYWORDS: Disabilitycrip artsdesireassemblagesaffectheartbreakrhizomatic cartography Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.Notes1 We wish to thank a reviewer for their suggestion that we open the interpretation to include cripping health conventions.Additional informationFundingThis work was supported by Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.Notes on contributorsKimberlee CollinsKimberlee Collins is a PhD candidate at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto. Her research emerges at the intersections of critical disability studies, climate justice and posthumanism to explore emotional responses to climate change and environmental degradation.Chelsea Temple JonesChelsea Temple Jones is an Associate Professor of Child and Youth Studies at Brock University. Dr. Jones' qualitative research focuses on disabled children's childhood studies and takes intellectual disability as a cultural phenomenon.Carla RiceCarla Rice is Professor and Tier I Canada Research Chair in Feminist Studies and Social Practice in the College of Social and Applied Human Sciences at the University of Guelph, Canada. She is founder of the Re•Vision Centre for Art and Social Justice and Principal Investigator of Bodies in Translation: Activist Art, Technology and Access to Life.","PeriodicalId":42670,"journal":{"name":"Distinktion-Journal of Social Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135758653","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Fascist uses of conspiracy theories: alienation, anxiety, and false concreteness in the critical political theory of Franz Neumann","authors":"Peter Chambers","doi":"10.1080/1600910x.2023.2252192","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/1600910x.2023.2252192","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACTRecent decades have seen are surgence in the use of conspiracy theories by populist and autocratic political figures. This has sat alongside a renewed interest in using insights from Frankfurt School thinkers to open critical perspectives on fascist uses of conspiracy theories. This paper builds on resurgent interest in the work of Franz Neumann, and directs attention to the political manipulation of alienation and anxiety. Building on Neumann’s insistence that a falsely concrete theory of history is in operation wherever conspiracy theories resonate politically, this paper argues for the neglected centrality of conspiracy thinking in nearly all instances of fascist politics. Conspiracy theories are a structural feature of fascism – a hypothesis that invites empirical testing to see if it might better fit the overall pattern. Neumann’s political critical theory also returns our attention to the possibility of an antifascist critical theory with the political at the centre of its concerns, opening lines of inquiry that complement Adorno’s insights into domination of the administered world and the culture industry.KEYWORDS: Conspiracy theoriesFranz NeumannalienationanxietyfascismFrankfurt school Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 I note the very different valence that Connolly and Rosa give to resonance, without pursuing that here.2 Though the ambit of this paper precludes my pursuit of this further, the decline of the political use of this term is theoretically notable, appearing as it does in major works of Spengler, Gramsci, Weber, and Sorel. A Google N gram search suggests the term peaked in 1873; the work of Poulantz as and Baehr, worth exploring, are outliers.Additional informationNotes on contributorsPeter ChambersPeter Chambers, Pete teaches Global Crime and Critical Criminology at RMIT Melbourne, where he is senior lecturer in Criminology and Justice. Pete's work responds to basic questions about the worlds we live in now, sits within traditions of critical and social theory, and emphasises the importance of norms and values, especially conflicting visions of justice and the good society. It asks: how are we to live our lives, together, somehow, now? In the 2010s, his scholarly work focused on the emergence of border security, as well as sovereignty, securitization, offshore, disruption, and logistics. His work in the 2020s returns to and builds on insights from classical sociology and the first generation of critical theory: in critical and theoretical criminology this is about rackets and racketeering; in broader fields of interest, it focuses on circulation, logistics, capitalism, control, and conspiracies, as well as the social and subjective formations that emerge in response to the shock, anxiety, and loneliness that marks our lives.","PeriodicalId":42670,"journal":{"name":"Distinktion-Journal of Social Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135758652","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Theorizing from neglected cases","authors":"Monika Krause","doi":"10.1080/1600910x.2023.2260568","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/1600910x.2023.2260568","url":null,"abstract":"Some cases in the social sciences have been attributed a greater capacity to generate transferrable insights than others. This is evident in the phenomenon now widely diagnosed as Eurocentrism but is not limited to it. When some cases are privileged by convention, others come into view as occasions primarily for ‘application’ of insights derived from other cases or of insights canonized in conversations organized around the label of ‘theory’. This paper seeks to identify opportunities for higher forms of theorizing based on these observations about patterns in existing knowledge-production, focusing particularly on the opportunities that arise for theorizing from a focus on ‘neglected cases’. Cases that have been neglected vis-à-vis specific categories help us to examine and challenge assumptions associated with existing concepts; they help us to reveal the range of properties bundled by existing concepts and allow us to develop a more precise vocabulary for the universe of social phenomena, which is the basis for description, explanation and critique. Based on the distinction between ‘privileged’ cases on the one hand and ‘neglected’ cases on the other hand, the paper also discusses strategies for the reflective use of privileged cases for theorizing.","PeriodicalId":42670,"journal":{"name":"Distinktion-Journal of Social Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136063863","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Fame democracy? Social media and visuality-based transformation of the public sphere","authors":"Eeva Luhtakallio, Taina Meriluoto","doi":"10.1080/1600910x.2023.2263818","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/1600910x.2023.2263818","url":null,"abstract":"We argue that a shift in the underlying values that inform people’s actions in the public sphere is taking place in the social media age. From ways of qualifying the public sphere as a space that prioritizes equality, mutual respect and careful deliberation, action that creates visibility, attention and followership is increasingly valued above all else. This change translates into a transformation of the public sphere that requires revisiting the conceptual tools of democratic publics. In contrast to the Habermasian normative approach, we suggest that an empirically grounded definition of the public sphere, discernible with tools from justification theory, enables identifying a wider variety of public actions and interrogating the different moral foundations of public spheres. Based on ongoing research on visual politicization, we argue that the world of fame increasingly challenges the valuation logics of the market and the civic worlds as the value base informing public action. We illustrate our argument with examples from our ethnographic work on social media activists, the figure of an influencer/politician, and social media actors countering the algorithmic logic of the present public sphere. Finally, we discuss these transformations’ consequences to democracy theory. We suggest a way towards a democracy theory which includes a plurality of arguments and values—even ones that may threaten democracy—as a remedy to the potentially blinding effects of civic normativity.","PeriodicalId":42670,"journal":{"name":"Distinktion-Journal of Social Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135549124","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Theorizing together","authors":"Tobias Werron, Jelena Brankovic, Leopold Ringel","doi":"10.1080/1600910x.2023.2259288","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/1600910x.2023.2259288","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACTThe article outlines ideas for a methodology of collaborative theorizing. The first part introduces our understanding of theorizing as a craft that provides all scholars in the social sciences and humanities – not just self-described theorists – with the ability to develop their thinking in the course of the research process and draws attention to everyday research practices that are usually not covered by the literature on qualitative and quantitative research methods. ‘Theorizing together,’ as part of this craft, can be understood as a synergetic mode of theory-making geared to harnessing the advantages of everyday collaboration. The second part makes the case for a methodology of theorizing together built on personal experiences. First, we review our own research on rankings to show how collaborative practices allowed us to gain novel insights into an object of study, which would not have been possible had we done our research separately. Then, we offer preliminary ideas for a methodology. Specifically, we identify a number of practices involved in theorizing together and discuss various challenges and conditions associated with it. Our main goal is to inspire others to share their experience with collaborative work and, in the spirit of theorizing together, to further develop this mode of collective inquiry.KEYWORDS: Theorizingpractices of theorizingcollaborationmethodologyrankingshistorical sociologyorganizations AcknowledgementsThe authors would like to thank Simon Hecke, Johannes Ratte, Silke Engels, Helga Volkening, Katharina Braunsmann, Linda Heiken, Clelia Minnetian, Stefan Wilbers, Stella Medellias, Anna Lena Grüner, Karina Korneli, Antonia Stüwe, Ellen Hegewaldt, Can David Tobias, Elisabeth Strietzel, Vivian Vollbrecht and Jasmin Weissberg for participating in our collaboration through the years and making it such a fun and productive experience. We also thank the German Research Foundation (DFG) for funding the research projects that made parts of this collaboration possible. Finally, we would like to express our gratitude to Michael Guggenheim and Distinktion’s two anonyomous reviewers, who have helped us improve the article with their comments on an earlier version.Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 We ought to mention that the productivity of our collaboration was limited by the fact that most members joined the team on temporary contracts. These employment conditions, common in the German university system, are clearly not conducive to establishing a stable team and thus, by implication, to theorizing together.2 This changed considerably during the COVID 19-pandemic, when, at times, face-to-face interaction was impossible or strongly discouraged. We used Zoom meetings as some kind of substitute but experienced them as more tiring and less fun.3 This includes an alert that announces every addition to the database in real time (if this is more ‘togetherness’ than you c","PeriodicalId":42670,"journal":{"name":"Distinktion-Journal of Social Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135689388","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Social theory and overinterpretation","authors":"Isaac Ariail Reed","doi":"10.1080/1600910x.2023.2258289","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/1600910x.2023.2258289","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACTTheory is the use of abstraction in the pursuit of understanding. In the human sciences, theory is a talmudic process of reading and conceptual dispute that carries the colligation of evidentiary signs (minimal interpretation) towards riskier, but more insightful and widely relevant, interpretations of the meanings, causes, and significance of human events (maximal interpretation). Yet, in making possible such maximal interpretations of society, politics, literature, and so forth, theory also introduces the possibility of overinterpreting evidence. Judgments that overinterpretation has occurred are made collectively within communities of inquiry. After developing Umberto Eco’s theory of overinterpretation as part of a hermeneutic-semiotic account of theory in the human sciences, this paper conducts a case study of the rise and partial fall of the Marxist interpretation of the French Revolution. This reveals aspects of the process whereby patterns of maximal interpretation, carried through several academic generations, allow the development and refinement of knowledge and insight about an object of inquiry, on the one hand, and yet are subject to judgment as overinterpreted, on the other. Much more than a matter of falsification and/or the politics of intellectuals, the decline of the Marxist interpretation of the French Revolution involved a complex series of judgments about the degree to which an abstract theoretical terminology could continue to produce new and deeper understandings. In conclusion, the paper suggests that the talmudic aspect of social theory has affinities with the universal human capacity for thinking.KEYWORDS: InterpretationFrench RevolutionsemioticsMarxismhermeneuticsTalmudUmberto ecosociological theory Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 The author thanks and acknowledges comments on previous drafts of this paper by Monika Krause, Michael Weinman, Berit Vannebo, Tobias Schlechtriemen, and two anonymous reviewers for Distinktion.2 One of the implications of the hermeneutic-semiotic position on theory that animates this paper is that certain traditions of thought can be both radical and a tradition, since the use of ‘tradition’ here refers to the cultivation of practices of interpretation that can connect one generation of intellectuals to the next. For the writers of the Black Atlantic as constituting a ‘non-traditional tradition,’ see Gilroy (Citation1993). For the operation of theory as traditions of interpretation that encode ambitions for modernity, see Alexander (Citation1995).3 I owe this example to Johans Sandvin, who introduced it during a seminar on sociological analysis I was leading in Bodø, Norway in 2022.4 The image of a web of theoretical texts operates, for Merton (Citation1968), to differentiate science (social and natural) from the humanities; he seeks to remove this image from the regulative picture of social science, because he regards it as a ","PeriodicalId":42670,"journal":{"name":"Distinktion-Journal of Social Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135207374","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}