Pub Date : 2024-09-19DOI: 10.1177/02632764241275466
Brice Laurent
This article traces a path through Bruno Latour’s reflections on politics to propose a constitutional reading, which makes ontological and normative lines of investigation intersect. It starts with a discussion of a central theme in Latour’s work, that of war and, more generally, opposition and conflicts, and connects it with questions of representation, delegation and decision-making. The preoccupation with land and territories found in Latour’s latest work is an invitation to extend his notion of constitution and turn it into a situated matter of critical inquiry. The paper builds on debates and controversies surrounding mineral resources to show the analytical and critical value of constitutional analysis, and the way it can illuminate the ontological and normative issues associated with contemporary problematizations of land and territories.
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Pub Date : 2024-09-18DOI: 10.1177/02632764241275443
Antoine Hennion
Without shouting it from the rooftops, Latour never hid the fact that he was a Catholic. Taking advantage of their friendly closeness, Antoine Hennion takes the liberty of proposing various readings of the way in which this curious parishioner lived his faith, each more or less compatible with the others, and with no need to decide between them.
{"title":"Bruno Latour and Religion: A Strange Parishioner","authors":"Antoine Hennion","doi":"10.1177/02632764241275443","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/02632764241275443","url":null,"abstract":"Without shouting it from the rooftops, Latour never hid the fact that he was a Catholic. Taking advantage of their friendly closeness, Antoine Hennion takes the liberty of proposing various readings of the way in which this curious parishioner lived his faith, each more or less compatible with the others, and with no need to decide between them.","PeriodicalId":48276,"journal":{"name":"Theory Culture & Society","volume":"11 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2024-09-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142248613","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-09-18DOI: 10.1177/02632764241275489
Didier Debaise
In his major work, An Inquiry into the Modes of Existence, Bruno Latour sets out to establish an anthropology of the Moderns based on the plurality of the modes of existence that make up their world. What about the beings of science, politics, art, religion, economics and so on? How do these beings relate to one another, and how do they constitute the specific forms of thought of the Moderns? Taking as its starting point one of the central notions of modern thought, namely the notion of matter, this article seeks to identify the way in which Latour shows its importance in the constitution of modern thought. It examines its topicality through the double prism of an ecological and decolonial approach that animates Latour’s work, and which this article proposes to revisit.
布鲁诺-拉图尔（Bruno Latour）在其重要著作《存在方式探究》（An Inquiry into the Modes of Existence）中，以构成现代人世界的存在方式的多元性为基础，建立了现代人的人类学。那么，科学、政治、艺术、宗教、经济等方面的存在又是怎样的呢？这些存在如何相互联系，又如何构成现代人的特定思想形式？本文以现代思想的核心概念之一，即 "物质 "概念为出发点，试图找出拉图尔是如何显示其在现代思想构成中的重要性的。文章通过生态学和非殖民化方法的双重棱镜审视了这一概念的现实意义，生态学和非殖民化方法是拉图尔作品的生命力所在，本文建议重新审视生态学和非殖民化方法。
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Pub Date : 2024-09-18DOI: 10.1177/02632764241275483
Isabelle Stengers
In Down to Earth, Bruno Latour addresses all inhabitants of the Earth as contemporary, all sharing a same present which he names ‘the new climatic regime’. It does not mean that Latour endorses a new type of coloniality, erasing differences in the name of the emergency. ‘Becoming Terrestrials’ is not a call for unity in order to ‘save the Earth’. It does however put into question the ‘charitable fiction’ Latour proposed in what he considered his opus magnus, the Inquiry into Modes of Existence. This paper will address the concern Latour expressed at the end of his life: has his Inquiry a future in the new climatic regime? Will the values Moderns both instaured and mistreated still matter for the ex-Moderns? This induces a reading of the Inquiry attentive to both its strategy and its partis pris, that confronts them with the radical orientation changes that mark Down to Earth. This results in a speculation about some of the rewritings Bruno Latour might have considered, had life granted him the time.
布鲁诺-拉图尔（Bruno Latour）在《脚踏实地》（Down to Earth）一书中把地球上的所有居民都视为当代人，他们共享一个相同的现在，他将其命名为 "新气候制度"。这并不意味着拉图尔赞同一种新型的殖民主义，以紧急的名义抹杀差异。成为地球人》并不是为了 "拯救地球 "而呼吁团结。然而，它确实质疑了拉图尔在他自认为的巨著《存在方式探究》中提出的 "慈善虚构"。本文将探讨拉图尔在生命最后时刻表达的忧虑：他的《探索》在新的气候体系中是否有未来？现代人灌输和践踏的价值观对于前现代人是否仍然重要？这促使我们对《调查》进行解读，关注其战略和党派，使其与 "脚踏实地 "所标志的彻底的方向性变化相对抗。由此，我们可以推测，如果布鲁诺-拉图尔有时间的话，他可能会考虑进行一些改写。
{"title":"With and after the Inquiry: How Do We Pragmatically Move from the Moderns to the Contemporaries?","authors":"Isabelle Stengers","doi":"10.1177/02632764241275483","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/02632764241275483","url":null,"abstract":"In Down to Earth, Bruno Latour addresses all inhabitants of the Earth as contemporary, all sharing a same present which he names ‘the new climatic regime’. It does not mean that Latour endorses a new type of coloniality, erasing differences in the name of the emergency. ‘Becoming Terrestrials’ is not a call for unity in order to ‘save the Earth’. It does however put into question the ‘charitable fiction’ Latour proposed in what he considered his opus magnus, the Inquiry into Modes of Existence. This paper will address the concern Latour expressed at the end of his life: has his Inquiry a future in the new climatic regime? Will the values Moderns both instaured and mistreated still matter for the ex-Moderns? This induces a reading of the Inquiry attentive to both its strategy and its partis pris, that confronts them with the radical orientation changes that mark Down to Earth. This results in a speculation about some of the rewritings Bruno Latour might have considered, had life granted him the time.","PeriodicalId":48276,"journal":{"name":"Theory Culture & Society","volume":"22 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2024-09-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142248612","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-09-14DOI: 10.1177/02632764241268174
Joan Rovira Martorell, Ana Gálvez, Francisco Tirado
The aim of this paper is to present artificial intelligence (AI) as an organ with a role in the production of judicial truth, expanding its objects, changing its procedures and reshaping the distribution of agencies within the judicial organism. To this end, it builds on Michel Foucault’s work on the procedures of truth production and the three subject forms involved: operator, spectator and object. This is then complemented by the general organological perspective proposed by Bernard Stiegler. On the basis of both, we will demonstrate two realities: first, that AI is shifting truth production from the individual to the profile, and second, that the types of associations that AI is forming have the potential to curtail human agency in the production of judicial truth.
{"title":"Artificial Intelligence and the Production of Judicial Truth","authors":"Joan Rovira Martorell, Ana Gálvez, Francisco Tirado","doi":"10.1177/02632764241268174","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/02632764241268174","url":null,"abstract":"The aim of this paper is to present artificial intelligence (AI) as an organ with a role in the production of judicial truth, expanding its objects, changing its procedures and reshaping the distribution of agencies within the judicial organism. To this end, it builds on Michel Foucault’s work on the procedures of truth production and the three subject forms involved: operator, spectator and object. This is then complemented by the general organological perspective proposed by Bernard Stiegler. On the basis of both, we will demonstrate two realities: first, that AI is shifting truth production from the individual to the profile, and second, that the types of associations that AI is forming have the potential to curtail human agency in the production of judicial truth.","PeriodicalId":48276,"journal":{"name":"Theory Culture & Society","volume":"53 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2024-09-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142248616","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-08-31DOI: 10.1177/02632764241267916
Niyousha Bastani
Educational approaches to counter-extremism are proliferating globally, claiming to foster ‘critical thinking’ amongst those deemed vulnerable to extremism. These projects ‘make sense’ through two mutually-reinforcing discourses: a psychological discourse that adjudicates the moral value of different ways of thinking through scientific measures; and an ethical discourse of liberal education that idealizes critical thinking as essential to human development – becoming more human and humane. Counter-extremism mobilizes both to over-represent a ‘dominant genre of being’, to take Sylvia Wynter’s phrase, as if it were the only way of being human. Such projects show how expert and everyday understandings of ‘critical thinking’ have been shaped by psychology’s history as a race science and liberal understandings of education that have legitimated hierarchies of being human. I argue that these conditions of possibility that shape critical thinking must be grappled with in any critical pursuit against hierarchies of being human.
{"title":"Counter-Extremism and ‘Critical Thinking’ as a Measure of the Human","authors":"Niyousha Bastani","doi":"10.1177/02632764241267916","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/02632764241267916","url":null,"abstract":"Educational approaches to counter-extremism are proliferating globally, claiming to foster ‘critical thinking’ amongst those deemed vulnerable to extremism. These projects ‘make sense’ through two mutually-reinforcing discourses: a psychological discourse that adjudicates the moral value of different ways of thinking through scientific measures; and an ethical discourse of liberal education that idealizes critical thinking as essential to human development – becoming more human and humane. Counter-extremism mobilizes both to over-represent a ‘dominant genre of being’, to take Sylvia Wynter’s phrase, as if it were the only way of being human. Such projects show how expert and everyday understandings of ‘critical thinking’ have been shaped by psychology’s history as a race science and liberal understandings of education that have legitimated hierarchies of being human. I argue that these conditions of possibility that shape critical thinking must be grappled with in any critical pursuit against hierarchies of being human.","PeriodicalId":48276,"journal":{"name":"Theory Culture & Society","volume":"38 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2024-08-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142176225","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-08-31DOI: 10.1177/02632764241268241
Christof Royer
This article argues that Slavoj Žižek’s provocative speech at the Frankfurt Book Fair was a political event of the first order. Described as a major scandal triggered by Žižek’s remarks on the Israel-Hamas war, the speech was much more than a deliberate provocation. It provides a window into a world that had become unhinged long before the conflict erupted anew. It offers an opportunity to observe the complex relationship between individuals, institutions, and society. It continues to be a cautionary tale that illustrates the thin line between courage and hypocrisy; and how difficult it is to practise diversity in a world gripped by the dangerous logic of evil. Thus, Žižek’s opening address transcends its immediate context because it brings us up against one of today’s defining questions: what does it mean, and what does it take, to practise diversity when facing the most divisive topics of our time?
{"title":"Žižek at the Buchmesse: Evil, Cancel Culture, and the Difficulty of Diversity","authors":"Christof Royer","doi":"10.1177/02632764241268241","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/02632764241268241","url":null,"abstract":"This article argues that Slavoj Žižek’s provocative speech at the Frankfurt Book Fair was a political event of the first order. Described as a major scandal triggered by Žižek’s remarks on the Israel-Hamas war, the speech was much more than a deliberate provocation. It provides a window into a world that had become unhinged long before the conflict erupted anew. It offers an opportunity to observe the complex relationship between individuals, institutions, and society. It continues to be a cautionary tale that illustrates the thin line between courage and hypocrisy; and how difficult it is to practise diversity in a world gripped by the dangerous logic of evil. Thus, Žižek’s opening address transcends its immediate context because it brings us up against one of today’s defining questions: what does it mean, and what does it take, to practise diversity when facing the most divisive topics of our time?","PeriodicalId":48276,"journal":{"name":"Theory Culture & Society","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2024-08-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142176226","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-08-27DOI: 10.1177/02632764241268164
İbrahim Berkan Karataş
How do the flexibilized scenes of cruel optimism crystallize and resonate with the situational displays of crises as a governmental oversight? Centering around this question, the paper aims to offer a critical fulcrum for problematic attachments toward future-mediated fantasies in the aftermath of the Kahramanmaras earthquakes. It starts with evaluating how the pastoral mode was applied as a cruel diagram of positivity by the Turkish government through the omnipresent prowess of the media, which presents an ‘ordinaryizing’ affect in regularizing the fatalistic discourses and relief efforts. It then continues to analyze the retributive discourses by the politicians and officials that triggered the oscillatory porosity among varied (de)subjectivities, toggling between sovereign misrecognitions and exclusions, as well as spiritually vivifying the optimistic barriers of cruelty. Lastly, it discusses in what ways the hopeful projections reconciled with the preemption by the dominant scientific narratives paradoxically prolong the preexistence of uncertainty and trust.
{"title":"Cruel Optimism as an Ecology of Powers","authors":"İbrahim Berkan Karataş","doi":"10.1177/02632764241268164","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/02632764241268164","url":null,"abstract":"How do the flexibilized scenes of cruel optimism crystallize and resonate with the situational displays of crises as a governmental oversight? Centering around this question, the paper aims to offer a critical fulcrum for problematic attachments toward future-mediated fantasies in the aftermath of the Kahramanmaras earthquakes. It starts with evaluating how the pastoral mode was applied as a cruel diagram of positivity by the Turkish government through the omnipresent prowess of the media, which presents an ‘ordinaryizing’ affect in regularizing the fatalistic discourses and relief efforts. It then continues to analyze the retributive discourses by the politicians and officials that triggered the oscillatory porosity among varied (de)subjectivities, toggling between sovereign misrecognitions and exclusions, as well as spiritually vivifying the optimistic barriers of cruelty. Lastly, it discusses in what ways the hopeful projections reconciled with the preemption by the dominant scientific narratives paradoxically prolong the preexistence of uncertainty and trust.","PeriodicalId":48276,"journal":{"name":"Theory Culture & Society","volume":"15 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2024-08-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142176227","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-07-25DOI: 10.1177/02632764241256526
Douglas Kellner
In my engagement with Stefan Müller-Doohm’s Habermas: A Biography, I argue that Müller-Doohm presents Habermas’s life and theoretical development, demonstrating a line of continuity through Habermas’s first published book on the public sphere to his later work on communicative action, and how this theme provides a guiding thread throughout Habermas’s work and constitutes one of his major contributions to contemporary theory, which is also highly relevant to and intersects with Habermas’s activism. Further, he documents Habermas’s trajectory from his early theoretical works through his linguistic turn to the present. The study demonstrates how Habermas’s philosophical work from his early theory of the public sphere to his linguistic turn establishes Habermas’s theme of communicative action as a major philosophical contribution which has relevance for the many theoretical and political texts Habermas has produced in his long, distinguished, and immensely productive career. Yet, in a concluding critical section, I argue that Müller-Doohm does not adequately engage with Habermas’s theoretical conceptions, downplaying his philosophical achievements while failing to explore relevant theoretical literature and philosophical debates on Habermas that have accompanied his work for decades.
我在阅读 Stefan Müller-Doohm 的《哈贝马斯传》时认为，Müller-Doohm 介绍了哈贝马斯的生平和理论发展，展示了哈贝马斯第一本关于公共领域的著作的连续性：传记》一书中，我认为穆勒-杜姆介绍了哈贝马斯的生平和理论发展，展示了从哈贝马斯第一本出版的关于公共领域的著作到他后来关于交际行动的著作之间的连续性，以及这一主题是如何贯穿哈贝马斯的著作并构成他对当代理论的主要贡献之一的，这也与哈贝马斯的行动主义高度相关并相互交叉。此外，他还记录了哈贝马斯从早期理论著作到语言学转向再到现在的发展轨迹。该研究展示了哈贝马斯从早期公共领域理论到语言学转向的哲学工作是如何将哈贝马斯的交流行动主题确立为一项重要的哲学贡献的，这一贡献与哈贝马斯在其漫长、杰出和富有成果的职业生涯中创作的众多理论和政治文本息息相关。然而，在最后的批评部分，我认为 Müller-Doohm 没有充分探讨哈贝马斯的理论构想，贬低了他的哲学成就，同时也没有探讨伴随哈贝马斯工作数十年的相关理论文献和哲学争论。
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Pub Date : 2024-07-24DOI: 10.1177/02632764241258404
Bojan Baća
The messy politics of combating the COVID-19 pandemic, compounded by the confusion caused by the global (dis)infodemic, have propelled conspiracism from the fringes of society into the public mainstream. Despite the growing political impact of digitally enabled conspiracy theories, they are predominantly delegitimized on three fronts – as psychopathology, pseudoscience, and/or parapolitics. In contrast, this article employs three non-pathologizing conceptual counteroffers borrowed from critical theory, deconstructionist historiography, and citizenship studies – namely, cognitive mapping, narrative emplotment, and performative citizenship – to politicize conspiracy theorizing ‘from below’. Using QAnon as a case-in-point, the article introduces two novel concepts that invite a sociological approach to conspiracism: first, the epistemic communities of the unreal, which designates the participatory, interactive, and decentralized nature of collaboratively creating unreal explanations of the real world; and second, grassroots conspiracism, which denotes the ways in which these bottom-up, horizontal, and collective meaning-making practices and knowledge-production processes are expanding spaces of and for politics.
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