Pub Date : 2024-08-22DOI: 10.1177/07255136241265309
Peter Beilharz, Frédéric Vandenberghe
Thesis 11 is pleased to republish this interview of Jeffrey Alexander by Frédéric Vandenberghe which first appeared in Sociologia & Antropologia in 2019 during the moment of Alexander's retirement from Yale University. It is preceded by two new prefaces by Peter Beilharz and Vandenberghe. The interview ranges across Alexander's entire career, from early journalism to the foundations of social theorizing to the supervision and mentoring of graduate students.
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Pub Date : 2024-08-02DOI: 10.1177/07255136241257002
Harry Blatterer
Niklas Luhmann’s approach to relationships was ambivalent. While references to the word abound in his work, his systems theory renders ‘relationship’ redundant as key concept. This has made it difficult for Luhmannian theorists to describe social forms that endure beyond serial interactions. Attempts have been made to overcome this ‘latency problem’ by conceptualising relationships as social systems. Contending that by focusing on communication these attempts reproduce rather than solve the problem, this article proposes an alternative solution. Centred in Luhmann’s conception of meaning, it conceives of relationships as meaning forms ( Sinnformen) in whose construal the phenomenalising capacities of psychical systems play a vital role: mental operations such as imagined interactions routinely bridge phases of non-interaction, which are constitutive elements of relationships. This critical reconstruction aims to contribute to a fuller grasp of the interdependencies between serial interactions and enduring relationships in Luhmann’s own terms.
{"title":"From systems to forms: Reconstructing Niklas Luhmann’s approach to relationships","authors":"Harry Blatterer","doi":"10.1177/07255136241257002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/07255136241257002","url":null,"abstract":"Niklas Luhmann’s approach to relationships was ambivalent. While references to the word abound in his work, his systems theory renders ‘relationship’ redundant as key concept. This has made it difficult for Luhmannian theorists to describe social forms that endure beyond serial interactions. Attempts have been made to overcome this ‘latency problem’ by conceptualising relationships as social systems. Contending that by focusing on communication these attempts reproduce rather than solve the problem, this article proposes an alternative solution. Centred in Luhmann’s conception of meaning, it conceives of relationships as meaning forms ( Sinnformen) in whose construal the phenomenalising capacities of psychical systems play a vital role: mental operations such as imagined interactions routinely bridge phases of non-interaction, which are constitutive elements of relationships. This critical reconstruction aims to contribute to a fuller grasp of the interdependencies between serial interactions and enduring relationships in Luhmann’s own terms.","PeriodicalId":54188,"journal":{"name":"Thesis Eleven","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2024-08-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141883767","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 : 2024-06-11DOI: 10.1177/07255136241256980
Mathew Abbott
This paper criticises contemporary posthumanist theories of anthropocentrism by reading an early essay by Bertrand Russell alongside work by Rosi Braidotti and Jane Bennett. It argues that, despite appearances, scientism and posthumanism share key commitments in common, such that clarifying the problems with which Russell struggles regarding nature and significance can illuminate symmetrical problems in posthumanism. Against these alternatives, the paper draws on insights from Bernard Williams, contemporary Hegelian philosophy, and J. J. Gibson’s work on animal agency to sketch a picture of what it means to take a human perspective. It is the perspective of one species among others, with a particular evolutionary history; it is also the perspective of a species that, because of certain developments in that history, knows itself as such. That opens us to forms of answerability to the world that do not touch the lives of unselfconscious animals. Some critics of the theoretical discourse on anthropocentrism have argued that taking a human perspective is morally unobjectionable. This paper goes further: it is necessary for grasping our relation to the rest of nature and so our responsibilities for it.
本文通过阅读伯特兰-罗素早期的一篇文章以及罗西-布赖多蒂和简-贝内特的作品，对当代后人道主义的人类中心主义理论进行了批判。本文认为，尽管表面上看，科学主义和后人文主义在关键承诺上有共同之处，因此，澄清罗素在自然和意义方面所挣扎的问题，可以揭示后人文主义中的对称问题。针对这些替代方案，本文借鉴了伯纳德-威廉斯、当代黑格尔哲学和吉布森（J. J. Gibson）关于动物能动性的著作中的见解，勾勒出一幅人类视角的图景。它是其他物种中的一个物种的视角，具有特定的进化历史；它也是一个物种的视角，由于这一历史的某些发展，它认识到自己是这样的一个物种。这就为我们提供了对世界负责的形式，而这种形式并不触及没有自我意识的动物的生活。一些批评人类中心主义理论的人认为，从人类的角度看问题在道德上是无可非议的。本文更进一步指出：人类中心主义对于把握我们与大自然其他部分的关系以及我们对大自然的责任是必要的。
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Pub Date : 2024-05-31DOI: 10.1177/07255136241256979
Panu Minkkinen
This article asks whether we can identify a vitalistic undertow in Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophy that would make sense for contemporary political and constitutional theory as well. The arguments are presented by contrasting Nietzsche’s philosophy with the social theory of Herbert Spencer. After an introduction, the first main part discusses Spencer and his so-called ‘organic analogy’ in which he draws parallels between natural organisms and the body politic. Spencer’s social theory is a paradigmatic example of vitalism and organic state theory and, as a counterpoint, can help tease out Nietzsche’s vitalism as well. The article then examines Nietzsche’s admittedly fragmentary encounters with Spencer and his flirtations with vitalism and organic state theory. In the conclusions, the reconstructed narrative about Nietzsche’s vitalism is linked with Nietzsche’s main philosophical works in the hope of provisionally extracting a Nietzschean ‘constitutional theory’ from his notion of will to power.
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Pub Date : 2024-05-31DOI: 10.1177/07255136241256984
Nikos Nikoletos
Shortly before the end of his life, Cornelius Castoriadis turned to radical political ecology, which he seemed to consider the only way to de-colonize the technicist, capitalist imaginary ( imaginaire), into which the totality of modern philosophy and praxis is, to use a Heideggerian concept, (heteronomously) being-thrown. Castoriadis’ critique of the capitalist imaginary, the imaginary of the unlimited extension of rational mastery, is in a state of eclectic affinity with the unsurpassed critique of the autonomous Technique by the French theologian and sociologist Jacques Ellul. Ellul had highlighted the necessity of demythologizing the spirit of technicism since the 1940s, when he was working on the uncontrollability of modern technology, which in his work is depicted as the societal manifestation of the Ge-stell.The Weberian ideal type of formal rationality runs through the critique of both thinkers. For Ellul, technology, or technique, is intrinsically rational. However, when technique is in contact with social and cultural milieus which belong to a non-technical formation and organization, paradoxes and irrationalities are inevitable. In turn, Castoriadis emphasizes the irrationality and autonomy that characterize the modern sphere of techno-science, which leads, with mathematical precision, to the ecological, and also the anthropological, destruction of the Anthropos. Therein lies the central problem of modernity’s technology. Is there a way out? Castoriadis envisions the foundation of a true democracy, nowhere near theocratic, which, nonetheless, must learn to limit itself politically and technologically. Ellul, on the other hand, highlights the ethics of non-power, an essentially spiritual and idealistic attitude that Hans Jonas will adopt a few years later, talking about the heuristics of fear.
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Pub Date : 2024-05-17DOI: 10.1177/07255136241242869
Andrew Wells
{"title":"Book review: The Work of History: Writing for Stuart Macintyre","authors":"Andrew Wells","doi":"10.1177/07255136241242869","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/07255136241242869","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":54188,"journal":{"name":"Thesis Eleven","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2024-05-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141059534","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 : 2024-05-08DOI: 10.1177/07255136241240087
J. Domingues
Critical social theory is a late product of the Enlightenment, though pushed beyond its original intentions. It then developed mainly with Marxism, but since the beginning other strands have been important, such as anarchism, feminism, anti-colonialism, anti-racism and environmentalism. The immanent critique of modernity must be seen indeed as ecumenical. In its plurality, it must have however at its core the realisation of equal freedom and full solidarity that remains an unfulfilled promise and offers a criterion of demarcation for critical theory. The diagnosis of the times for critical approaches also depended on identifying long-term developments, especially within Marxism, but this seems to have been almost entirely forgotten. I will argue that it is both possible and necessary to resume this strategy. Finally, I ask how we connect these conceptual issues to praxis. The article concludes with a more substantive discussion of political modernity.
{"title":"Ecumenical critical theory, pluralism and developmental trends","authors":"J. Domingues","doi":"10.1177/07255136241240087","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/07255136241240087","url":null,"abstract":"Critical social theory is a late product of the Enlightenment, though pushed beyond its original intentions. It then developed mainly with Marxism, but since the beginning other strands have been important, such as anarchism, feminism, anti-colonialism, anti-racism and environmentalism. The immanent critique of modernity must be seen indeed as ecumenical. In its plurality, it must have however at its core the realisation of equal freedom and full solidarity that remains an unfulfilled promise and offers a criterion of demarcation for critical theory. The diagnosis of the times for critical approaches also depended on identifying long-term developments, especially within Marxism, but this seems to have been almost entirely forgotten. I will argue that it is both possible and necessary to resume this strategy. Finally, I ask how we connect these conceptual issues to praxis. The article concludes with a more substantive discussion of political modernity.","PeriodicalId":54188,"journal":{"name":"Thesis Eleven","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2024-05-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140998163","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 : 2024-04-29DOI: 10.1177/07255136241240088
Daniel Cunningham
In this article, I argue for an historical understanding of the relationship between ideology and utopia/utopianism that positions the latter as a specifically modern compensation for the loss of the cosmologically grounded, unitary ideology supplied by the late medieval Christian Church. This claim relies upon but revises Fredric Jameson’s early theorization of the collaboration between ideology and utopia/utopianism, which emphasizes that utopian elements allow ideology to offer subjects a ‘compensatory exchange’ for their complicity. Developing my central argument requires considering the current viability of the ‘secularization thesis’, which classically associated modernization with secularization but which has undergone heavy criticism and revision by social scientists over the past half-century. These theoretical discussions, finally, are couched within a critical appraisal of the status of utopianism in contemporary politics.
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Pub Date : 2024-04-07DOI: 10.1177/07255136241240094
Peter Beilharz
The work and ideas of Antonio Gramsci continue to attract serious and sustained scholarly attention. This review essay, which might be viewed as an appendage to the earlier, 2016 Thesis Eleven essay ‘From Marx to Gramsci’, develops some of the lines of curiosity indicated there. Does the globalization of Gramsci occur at the expense of the recognition of the particularity of his thought, its specific time and place, and its clearly revolutionary intention? What do these phenomena signify, almost a century after?
安东尼奥-葛兰西的著作和思想继续吸引着学者们认真而持续的关注。这篇评论文章可被视为2016年《第十一届国际学术会议论文集》（Thesis Eleven）早期文章《从马克思到葛兰西》（From Marx to Gramsci）的附录，对该文中指出的一些好奇点进行了阐释。葛兰西的全球化是否以牺牲对其思想的特殊性、其特定的时间和地点以及其明确的革命意图的认识为代价？这些现象在近一个世纪之后意味着什么？
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