Pub Date : 2022-05-03DOI: 10.1080/1600910X.2022.2054447
T. Mcgowan
ABSTRACT Capitalism channels the subject’s sublimation into the commodity, which causes the subject to misidentify the nature of its freedom. The self-limiting freedom of sublimation becomes the unlimited freedom to do anything of the commodity form. Self-limiting freedom becomes liberal freedom. The liberal notion of freedom is a foundational misconception build into the commodity form itself. Even theorists of freedom not explicitly attempting to champion capitalism often fall into the trap of theorizing freedom along the lines of the misconception that capitalist society produces. When the subject directs its sublimating power to a commodity rather than to an ordinary object, it necessarily sees freedom as the opening to an ever-increasing horizon of possibility. The commodity causes the subject to see freedom as the freedom to have more because the commodity form includes within it the promise of a more bountiful future. One invests in a commodity, either financially or psychically, in order to partake in the commodity’s magical power to produce exponentially greater returns. The commodity form transforms capital into additional capital, so that the free act comes to represent unlimited possibility. Under capitalism, this logic of accumulation becomes grafted onto the free act of sublimation. Freedom becomes deformed into the choice for an unending drive to accumulate .
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Pub Date : 2022-05-03DOI: 10.1080/1600910X.2022.2054448
Mads Ejsing, Derek S. Denman
ABSTRACT This article offers three lessons for a post-pandemic democratic politics. First, the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the deep ontological entanglements of human and non-human systems: A submicroscopic agent jumping from an animal to a human host impacts human societies across the world. In the process, the virus has revealed a second lesson: Public responses to the pandemic have exacerbated already existing inequalities and fuelled anti-democratic desires for national and individual fortification. In a world where political emergencies like the pandemic are becoming more prevalent due to climatic and ecological destabilizations, there is an urgent need to promote new countervailing democratic forces. Together, these two insights motivate a third lesson: In order to address the ecological and political challenges of the so-called Anthropocene, democratic activism and political organizing must itself become more like the virus, more viral. Inspired by swarming behaviour in complex systems, a democratic politics of transformative change must give up illusions of simple solutions and central control, and instead rely on dispersed multi-sited actions happening at many scales at once, while working towards the improbable but necessary goal that these actions might, eventually, come together and bring about change at a planetary scale.
{"title":"Democratic politics in virulent times: three vital lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic","authors":"Mads Ejsing, Derek S. Denman","doi":"10.1080/1600910X.2022.2054448","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/1600910X.2022.2054448","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article offers three lessons for a post-pandemic democratic politics. First, the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the deep ontological entanglements of human and non-human systems: A submicroscopic agent jumping from an animal to a human host impacts human societies across the world. In the process, the virus has revealed a second lesson: Public responses to the pandemic have exacerbated already existing inequalities and fuelled anti-democratic desires for national and individual fortification. In a world where political emergencies like the pandemic are becoming more prevalent due to climatic and ecological destabilizations, there is an urgent need to promote new countervailing democratic forces. Together, these two insights motivate a third lesson: In order to address the ecological and political challenges of the so-called Anthropocene, democratic activism and political organizing must itself become more like the virus, more viral. Inspired by swarming behaviour in complex systems, a democratic politics of transformative change must give up illusions of simple solutions and central control, and instead rely on dispersed multi-sited actions happening at many scales at once, while working towards the improbable but necessary goal that these actions might, eventually, come together and bring about change at a planetary scale.","PeriodicalId":42670,"journal":{"name":"Distinktion-Journal of Social Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2022-05-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90863820","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}
Pub Date : 2022-03-21DOI: 10.1080/1600910X.2022.2039739
G. Rae
ABSTRACT This paper outlines and engages with Jacques Derrida’s notion of ‘autoimmunity’ to argue that it offers a unique resource for understanding the potential for critique inherent in and resultant from the COVID-19 pandemic. I first offer a brief genealogy of the terms ‘immunity/autoimmunity’ to show how they operate in biological, philosophical, and socio-political discourses, before outlining Derrida’s conception of the logic of autoimmunity, highlighting that it is not simply a negative phenomenon but a structural necessity of identity that opens up future possibilities. I then show how his logic of autoimmunity can be used to understand different dimensions of the coronavirus pandemic, including the possibilities for critique opened up therein. Crucially, such possibility arises not from a position external to the dominant logic or one that simply wishes to escape it, but because of the autoimmune structures internal to it. With this, I conclude that Derrida’s notion of autoimmunity points to an innovative way to understand social transformation from within the dynamics governing a dominant logic, all the while reminding and allowing us to think the resultant possibilities for new forms of critique and practices.
{"title":"Derrida, autoimmunity, and critique","authors":"G. Rae","doi":"10.1080/1600910X.2022.2039739","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/1600910X.2022.2039739","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT\u0000 This paper outlines and engages with Jacques Derrida’s notion of ‘autoimmunity’ to argue that it offers a unique resource for understanding the potential for critique inherent in and resultant from the COVID-19 pandemic. I first offer a brief genealogy of the terms ‘immunity/autoimmunity’ to show how they operate in biological, philosophical, and socio-political discourses, before outlining Derrida’s conception of the logic of autoimmunity, highlighting that it is not simply a negative phenomenon but a structural necessity of identity that opens up future possibilities. I then show how his logic of autoimmunity can be used to understand different dimensions of the coronavirus pandemic, including the possibilities for critique opened up therein. Crucially, such possibility arises not from a position external to the dominant logic or one that simply wishes to escape it, but because of the autoimmune structures internal to it. With this, I conclude that Derrida’s notion of autoimmunity points to an innovative way to understand social transformation from within the dynamics governing a dominant logic, all the while reminding and allowing us to think the resultant possibilities for new forms of critique and practices.","PeriodicalId":42670,"journal":{"name":"Distinktion-Journal of Social Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2022-03-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73140777","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}
Pub Date : 2022-03-20DOI: 10.1080/1600910X.2022.2045617
G. Sotiropoulos
ABSTRACT The paper sets out to explore the significance of the concept of environmental justice for a critical study of the Covid-19 pandemic. This task involves questioning the prevailing equation of justice with fairness, the limits of which have become manifest during the pandemic. In its place, a more holistic conceptualization is required, which registers the material environment as a constitutive dimension of the actuality of justice. It is toward such a holistic conceptualization that environmental justice discourse points. Yet, to fully meet its critical potential, the notion of environmental justice needs to widen its scope beyond problems of unequal distribution and disproportionate exposure of disenfranchized groups. Moreover, it must confront its own distributional logic, which ends up reducing the concept's potency and actuality to an ethical judgment on the current state of the world, whose failure to live up to a set ideal is seen as leading to environmental disaster. This critical confrontation will be accomplished through a materialist theorization of justice as a diagrammatic process of environment-making. Looking at the Covid-19 pandemic through this theoretical lens, it will be conceived as an ‘ethological accident’, which expresses in its very contingency an injustice that is integral to capitalist environments.
{"title":"Beyond fairness: the COVID-19 pandemic as an expression of environmental injustice","authors":"G. Sotiropoulos","doi":"10.1080/1600910X.2022.2045617","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/1600910X.2022.2045617","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The paper sets out to explore the significance of the concept of environmental justice for a critical study of the Covid-19 pandemic. This task involves questioning the prevailing equation of justice with fairness, the limits of which have become manifest during the pandemic. In its place, a more holistic conceptualization is required, which registers the material environment as a constitutive dimension of the actuality of justice. It is toward such a holistic conceptualization that environmental justice discourse points. Yet, to fully meet its critical potential, the notion of environmental justice needs to widen its scope beyond problems of unequal distribution and disproportionate exposure of disenfranchized groups. Moreover, it must confront its own distributional logic, which ends up reducing the concept's potency and actuality to an ethical judgment on the current state of the world, whose failure to live up to a set ideal is seen as leading to environmental disaster. This critical confrontation will be accomplished through a materialist theorization of justice as a diagrammatic process of environment-making. Looking at the Covid-19 pandemic through this theoretical lens, it will be conceived as an ‘ethological accident’, which expresses in its very contingency an injustice that is integral to capitalist environments.","PeriodicalId":42670,"journal":{"name":"Distinktion-Journal of Social Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2022-03-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86771383","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}
Pub Date : 2022-03-13DOI: 10.1080/1600910x.2022.2028646
Raymond L. M. Lee
{"title":"When masses re-individualize: affect, contagion and control in digital modernity","authors":"Raymond L. M. Lee","doi":"10.1080/1600910x.2022.2028646","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/1600910x.2022.2028646","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42670,"journal":{"name":"Distinktion-Journal of Social Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2022-03-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90221430","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}
Pub Date : 2022-01-23DOI: 10.1080/1600910x.2021.2012709
Benjamin Lipp, Sascha Dickel
{"title":"Interfacing the human/machine","authors":"Benjamin Lipp, Sascha Dickel","doi":"10.1080/1600910x.2021.2012709","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/1600910x.2021.2012709","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42670,"journal":{"name":"Distinktion-Journal of Social Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2022-01-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87945378","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}
Pub Date : 2022-01-02DOI: 10.1080/1600910X.2022.2058718
M. Konings, L. Adkins, Monique de Jong McKenzie, D. Woodman
The papers collected in this Special Issue are part of an ongoing series of conversations and workshops that take as their starting point the observation that the current conjuncture has been, and continues to be, deeply shaped by the logic of assets (some of these conversations were held, in person, at the University of Sydney, but they have continued in various online fora throughout the pandemic). From a certain angle, the claim that asset logics are a prominent aspect of our time could be seen as almost banal. These days it’s almost impossible to open a newspaper or social media account without being exposed to a list of news items about various new asset economies – bitcoin, NFTs, and a range of other financial inventions. All these are products of complex, somewhat unfamiliar technological design strategies, and they sit in an economic grey zone: nobody seems to be able to say exactly how they should be classified according to traditional economic categories. They are not simple commodities (in Marxist terms, they don’t seem to have any discernible usevalue separate from their exchange-value), nor are they money in any straightforward sense (with some exceptions, you can’t use them as general means of payment). This means that they have, almost by default, been classified as assets. But this re-classification doesn’t really resolve the mystery surrounding these new economies. After all, we normally think of assets as property titles or investments that are held because they are anticipated to generate returns in the future. With many of these tokens or symbolic chains, it is not at all clear why we should expect them to generate returns in the future. If they are assets, they are very unfamiliar kinds of assets. The conceptual puzzle that these strange assets pose is symptomatic of wider social changes. Their advent has entirely upended the notion, intuitively appealing to so many of us and the cornerstone of orthodox economic theory, that money is a simple measure. We are used to thinking (and orthodox economic theory is premised on the formal elaboration of this intuition) that there exists a world of objects, and that money is a more or less arbitrary, neutral convention that allows us to commensurate these heterogeneous objects. The new asset forms that are receiving so much attention these days undermine this distinction: they make it essentially impossible to separate object and measure, commodity and money. If it was at one point in time possible to imagine that we had an economic world that consisted of stable economic objects on
{"title":"Dimensions of the asset economy","authors":"M. Konings, L. Adkins, Monique de Jong McKenzie, D. Woodman","doi":"10.1080/1600910X.2022.2058718","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/1600910X.2022.2058718","url":null,"abstract":"The papers collected in this Special Issue are part of an ongoing series of conversations and workshops that take as their starting point the observation that the current conjuncture has been, and continues to be, deeply shaped by the logic of assets (some of these conversations were held, in person, at the University of Sydney, but they have continued in various online fora throughout the pandemic). From a certain angle, the claim that asset logics are a prominent aspect of our time could be seen as almost banal. These days it’s almost impossible to open a newspaper or social media account without being exposed to a list of news items about various new asset economies – bitcoin, NFTs, and a range of other financial inventions. All these are products of complex, somewhat unfamiliar technological design strategies, and they sit in an economic grey zone: nobody seems to be able to say exactly how they should be classified according to traditional economic categories. They are not simple commodities (in Marxist terms, they don’t seem to have any discernible usevalue separate from their exchange-value), nor are they money in any straightforward sense (with some exceptions, you can’t use them as general means of payment). This means that they have, almost by default, been classified as assets. But this re-classification doesn’t really resolve the mystery surrounding these new economies. After all, we normally think of assets as property titles or investments that are held because they are anticipated to generate returns in the future. With many of these tokens or symbolic chains, it is not at all clear why we should expect them to generate returns in the future. If they are assets, they are very unfamiliar kinds of assets. The conceptual puzzle that these strange assets pose is symptomatic of wider social changes. Their advent has entirely upended the notion, intuitively appealing to so many of us and the cornerstone of orthodox economic theory, that money is a simple measure. We are used to thinking (and orthodox economic theory is premised on the formal elaboration of this intuition) that there exists a world of objects, and that money is a more or less arbitrary, neutral convention that allows us to commensurate these heterogeneous objects. The new asset forms that are receiving so much attention these days undermine this distinction: they make it essentially impossible to separate object and measure, commodity and money. If it was at one point in time possible to imagine that we had an economic world that consisted of stable economic objects on","PeriodicalId":42670,"journal":{"name":"Distinktion-Journal of Social Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78665080","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}
Pub Date : 2021-12-06DOI: 10.1080/1600910X.2021.1991419
U. Tellmann
ABSTRACT This article develops a new theoretical perspective on the politics of financialization with housing as its specific case. The argument uses the recent debate on assets and assetization in the Social Studies of Finance as a starting point. In this debate, the asset is introduced vis-à-vis the commodity as a fruitful analytical category. The article argues that the suggested shift from the commodity to the asset allows for a novel understanding of the politics of financialization if it is accompanied by a parallel shift from ‘devices of calculation’ to what is here termed ‘devices of obligation’. Devices of obligation address the politics that produce the durability that the asset requires. Accounting for such politics of obligation offers a nuanced comprehension of the material, infrastructural, legal, and moral forms of binding time that are crucial for financialized revenues. In order to develop this theoretical framework, the article links insights from the Social Studies of Finance to the classical sociological theory of obligation in the work of Marcel Mauss. This allows a more granular understanding of the political dimension of financialization beyond the state. The analytical viability of this theoretical perspective is demonstrated through a case-study of the processes of the financialization of housing in Spain shortly before the financial crisis of 2008.
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Pub Date : 2021-11-01DOI: 10.1080/1600910X.2021.1991418
C. Wilén
ABSTRACT One of the major arguments made in the current boom in Haitian revolutionary studies connects today’s conditions of possibility for modern democracy and human rights to the abolition of slavery during the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804). During the last decade, however, this connection between the Haitian Revolutionary period and our own age has been questioned by an increasing number of scholars: a phenomenon that this article conceptualizes as the ‘sceptical turn’. The article argues that the sceptical turn consummates its critique through unacknowledged rearrangements of abstractions, and therefore misses its target. A corresponding critique of the sceptical turn is formulated here using Bertell Ollman’s tripartite concept of the abstractions of vantage point, extension, and generality. Ollman’s notion enables a shift of focus onto modes – instead of the more common focus on levels – of abstraction. Thus, the author argues, contra the sceptical turn, not only that the connection between the Haitian Revolution and the political and social situation of today is plausible, but that it also provides a more profound conceptual basis for analyses of revolutionary events in general.
{"title":"Remarks on the sceptical turn in the historiography of the Haitian Revolution: lessons from the art of abstraction","authors":"C. Wilén","doi":"10.1080/1600910X.2021.1991418","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/1600910X.2021.1991418","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT One of the major arguments made in the current boom in Haitian revolutionary studies connects today’s conditions of possibility for modern democracy and human rights to the abolition of slavery during the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804). During the last decade, however, this connection between the Haitian Revolutionary period and our own age has been questioned by an increasing number of scholars: a phenomenon that this article conceptualizes as the ‘sceptical turn’. The article argues that the sceptical turn consummates its critique through unacknowledged rearrangements of abstractions, and therefore misses its target. A corresponding critique of the sceptical turn is formulated here using Bertell Ollman’s tripartite concept of the abstractions of vantage point, extension, and generality. Ollman’s notion enables a shift of focus onto modes – instead of the more common focus on levels – of abstraction. Thus, the author argues, contra the sceptical turn, not only that the connection between the Haitian Revolution and the political and social situation of today is plausible, but that it also provides a more profound conceptual basis for analyses of revolutionary events in general.","PeriodicalId":42670,"journal":{"name":"Distinktion-Journal of Social Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2021-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87733285","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}
Pub Date : 2021-11-01DOI: 10.1080/1600910X.2021.1972324
M. Chihara
ABSTRACT Labour conditions in the first two decades of the twenty-first century in the US have become increasingly precarious and abusive. At the same time, many workers and users (no longer easily categorically separated) exhibit a sustained attachment to the idea of flexible work. For workers, internalizing the demand to be flexible as an affirmative choice can be a method of survival. But the demand for flexibility is also connected to an affective sense of agency and a refusal of alienation. For workers, flexibility connects strong convenience with access to fast cash. It connects a sense of play and creative fun with access to infrastructure and transit. The ‘unicorn’ rideshare company Lyft's brand narrative has capitalized on and exploited the desire for flexibility in historically specific political contexts. In light of these sticky financialized appropriations of flexibility, this essay imagines radical flexibility as a wilful re-appropriation. It explores ways that Lyft's rhetoric might be redirected and resisted. In light of existing demands for collective or cooperative platforms, radical flexibility could be a galvanizing justification for a cooperative response to the Uberization of work, part of a broader horizon that reclaims flexibility, play, creativity, and convenience as affects and practices outside of the wage relation.
{"title":"Radical flexibility: driving for Lyft and the future of work in the platform economy","authors":"M. Chihara","doi":"10.1080/1600910X.2021.1972324","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/1600910X.2021.1972324","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Labour conditions in the first two decades of the twenty-first century in the US have become increasingly precarious and abusive. At the same time, many workers and users (no longer easily categorically separated) exhibit a sustained attachment to the idea of flexible work. For workers, internalizing the demand to be flexible as an affirmative choice can be a method of survival. But the demand for flexibility is also connected to an affective sense of agency and a refusal of alienation. For workers, flexibility connects strong convenience with access to fast cash. It connects a sense of play and creative fun with access to infrastructure and transit. The ‘unicorn’ rideshare company Lyft's brand narrative has capitalized on and exploited the desire for flexibility in historically specific political contexts. In light of these sticky financialized appropriations of flexibility, this essay imagines radical flexibility as a wilful re-appropriation. It explores ways that Lyft's rhetoric might be redirected and resisted. In light of existing demands for collective or cooperative platforms, radical flexibility could be a galvanizing justification for a cooperative response to the Uberization of work, part of a broader horizon that reclaims flexibility, play, creativity, and convenience as affects and practices outside of the wage relation.","PeriodicalId":42670,"journal":{"name":"Distinktion-Journal of Social Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2021-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78900969","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}
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