Adorno’s Negative Dialectics as Critical Method

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sina Kramer
Keyword(s):  
Political Agency ◽  
The Political ◽  
Negative Dialectics ◽  
Critical Method ◽  
Political Epistemology ◽  
Constitutive Exclusion

Chapter 4 turns to the method of critique, for the sake of the political epistemology of constitutive exclusion. If constitutive exclusion produces the terms of intelligible political agency, then those cast in the space of exclusion will still be within, but will be politically unintelligible. How do we listen for what we cannot hear? This chapter takes up Adorno’s negative dialectics as a model for method, through an analysis of “nonidentity” as quasi-transcendent. Like the constitutively excluded element, nonidentity can only be found within what has excluded it rather than absolutely beyond it. Two requirements thus emerge: first, our method must be dialectical, because dialectics respects that what exceeds the delimited terms of politics emerges from within those terms but is not captured by them. Second, our method must be negative, because this keeps us from determining the meaning of contestations of constitutive exclusion in advance.

Multiplicity and Collective Contestation in the 1992 Los Angeles Riots/Rebellion

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sina Kramer
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Political Agency ◽  
The Political ◽  
Race Riots ◽  
Political Conditions ◽  
Los Angeles Riots ◽  
Constitutive Exclusion

Chapter 7 takes up the political unintelligibility of the 1992 Los Angeles (LA) Riot/Rebellion to understand—if not why the riots remain unintelligible to us as political contestation of political conditions—how this unintelligibility is produced and what significance it bears for us now. While riots (and race riots in particular) might be politically intelligible under certain conditions, the consolidation of anti-Black racism with riots throughout the latter twentieth century rendered “America’s first multiracial riot” particularly unintelligible as a political contestation of constitutive exclusion. I discuss the interrelation of gender, class, and sexuality in the Rodney King beating, the murder of Latasha Harlins, and the multiracial geography of the riots to articulate how the continued unintelligibility of the 1992 Los Angeles Riot/Rebellion, as well as contemporary riots, constitute political agency now.

Materialist History and Method

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sina Kramer
Keyword(s):  
Political Agency ◽  
Critical Method ◽  
Constitutive Exclusion

Chapter 5 argues that due to its retroactive character, any critique of constitutive exclusion must be retrospective: both materialist and historical. First, this critical method must be material as a means of releasing the possibilities sedimented in a political agency we often presume to be fixed, natural, and unified. It must also be material in order to orient our listening toward concrete conditions without reducing them to brute facticity and without romanticizing or fetishizing those constitutively excluded. Second, this critical method must also be retrospective or historical, because the retroactive temporality of constitutive exclusion leaves the current terrain of politics and intelligible political agency sedimented with multiple exclusions. By unearthing how things may have been otherwise, we release those sparks of resistance that they can still be otherwise.

Critical Models: Antigone, Rosa Parks and Claudette Colvin

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sina Kramer
Keyword(s):  
Political Agency ◽  
The Political ◽  
Montgomery Bus Boycott ◽  
Bus Boycott ◽  
Constitutive Exclusion

Chapter 6 treats the figures of Antigone, Rosa Parks, and Claudette Colvin as models for the contestation of constitutive exclusion. First, Antigone’s constitutive exclusion from Thebes excludes her from the terms of intelligible political agency. When she challenges that exclusion, her contestation is politically unintelligible. While the radical alternative Antigone represents leads to her death in the play, that challenge survives in the multiple performances and adaptations of the play. Second, the choice to organize the Montgomery bus boycott around Parks rather than Colvin reveals the multiplicity of constitutive exclusion, since Parks could play some axes of her identity off others in her contestation in ways Colvin could not. The effect of this choice reinscribes the political unintelligibility of Colvin and reifies Parks as apolitical. While the terms of political agency are defined through the exclusion of Colvin, the radical potential she represents remains buried within those terms.

ROUPAS COMO CORPOS: O AGENCIAMENTO POLÍTICO DO VESTUÁRIO POR CHRISTIAN BOLTANSKI / Clothes as bodies: the political agency of clothing by Christian Boltanski

2020 ◽  
Vol 26 (39) ◽  
pp. 55-65
Author(s):  
Angélica Adverse
Keyword(s):  
Political Agency ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Regimes ◽  
Historical Document ◽  
Central Idea ◽  
Political Experience

O artigo aborda o agenciamento das roupas no trabalho do artista Christian Boltanski. Partindo da dimensão do poder dos corpos têxteis, analisaremos como as roupas investem-se das palavras emudecidas dos corpos ausentes, constituindo-se como alegoria do testemunho e do documento histórico. A ideia central é pensar como as roupas explicitam a aniquilação humana provocada pelos regimes políticos totalitários. Analisaremos como as instalações Prendre la Parole (2005) e Personnes(2010) desvelam a presença-ausência da vida-morte na experiência política do discurso têxtil.  Palavras-chave: Roupas; Corpos; Agenciamento; Política; Memória.AbstractThe article addresses the agency of clothes in the work of the artist Christian Boltanski. Starting from the dimension of the power of the textile bodies, we will analyze how the clothes invest themselves with the muted words of the absent bodies, constituting themselves as an allegory of the testimony and of the historical document. The central idea is to think about how clothes make explicit human annihilation brought about by totalitarian political regimes. We will analyze how the installations Prendre la Parole (2005) and Personnes (2010) reveal the presence-absence of life-death in the political experience of textile discourse.Keywords: Clothes; Bodies; Agency; Politics; Memory. 

scholarly journals (In)coherent subjects? The politics of conceptualising resistance in the UK asylum system

2021 ◽  
pp. 239965442110338
Author(s):  
Sarah M Hughes
Keyword(s):  
Political Action ◽  
Political Agency ◽  
The Political ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
Sovereign Power ◽  
Subject Formation ◽  
Grounding Resistance ◽  
Migration Control ◽  
The Uk

Many accounts of resistance within systems of migration control pivot upon a coherent migrant subject, one that is imbued with political agency and posited as oppositional to particular forms of sovereign power. Drawing upon ethnographic research into the role of creativity within the UK asylum system, I argue that grounding resistance with a stable, coherent and agentic subject, aligns with oppositional narratives (of power vs resistance), and thereby risks negating the entangled politics of the (in)coherence of subject formation, and how this can contain the potential to disrupt, disturb or interrupt the practices and premise of the UK asylum system. I suggest that charity groups and subjects should not be written out of narratives of resistance apriori because they engage with ‘the state’: firstly, because to argue that there is a particular form that resistance should take is to place limits around what counts as the political; and secondly, because to ‘remain oppositional’ is at odds with an (in)coherent subject. I show how accounts which highlight a messy and ambiguous subjectivity, could be bought into understandings of resistance. This is important because as academics, we too participate in the delineation of the political and what counts as resistance. In predetermining what subjects, and forms of political action count as resistance we risk denying recognition to those within this system.

scholarly journals Justice beyond repair: Negative Dialectics and the politics of guilt and atonement

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Cucharo
Keyword(s):  
Complete Picture ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Capacity ◽  
Negative Dialectics ◽  
Political Status ◽  
Political Ethic

AbstractThis article draws out a critical, yet under-appreciated political theme in Adorno’s Negative Dialectics, namely his emphasis on guilt and atonement. First, the article assesses how Adorno’s Marxism allows him to think justice and guilt beyond the familiar legalistic frame. Second, the article reconstructs Adorno’s treatment of guilt as a distinctly political capacity to imagine one’s boundedness and indebtedness to others, and the affective engine enabling us to engage in a political ethic distinct from familiar categories of reparation. Third, the article shows how the themes of guilt and atonement give us a more complete picture of Negative Dialectics. This inquiry also intervenes in contemporary debates regarding the political status and emancipatory potential latent within guilt-feelings, and claims Adorno gives us a path forward to imagine the relation between guilt and politics in a novel way.

scholarly journals ‘Moving life stories tell us just why politics matters’: Personal narratives in tabloid anti-austerity campaigns

Journalism ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 18 (10) ◽  
pp. 1346-1363 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jen Birks
Keyword(s):  
Content Analysis ◽  
Civil Society ◽  
Qualitative Analysis ◽  
Welfare Reform ◽  
Life Stories ◽  
Personal Narratives ◽  
Political Agency ◽  
The Political ◽  
Civil Society Organisations

This article examines the use of personal narratives in two tabloid newspaper campaigns against a controversial welfare reform popularly known as the ‘bedroom tax’. It aims first to evaluate whether the personal narratives operate as political testimony to challenge government accounts of welfare reform and dominant stereotypes of benefits claimants, and second to assess the potential for and limits to progressive advocacy in popular journalism. The study uses content analysis of 473 articles over the course of a year in the Daily Mirror and Sunday People newspapers, and qualitative analysis of a sub-set of 113 articles to analyse the extent to which the campaign articles extrapolated from the personal to the general, and the role of ‘victim–witnesses’ in articulating their own subjectivity and political agency. The analysis indicates that both newspapers allowed affected individuals to express their own subjectivity to challenge stereotypes, but it was civil society organisations and opinion columnists who most explicitly extrapolated from the personal to the political. Collectively organised benefits claimants were rarely quoted, and there was some evidence of ventriloquisation of the editorial voice in the political criticisms of victim–witnesses. However, a campaigning columnist in the Mirror more actively empowered some of those affected to speak directly to politicians. This indicates the value of campaigning journalism when it is truly engaged in solidarity with those affected, rather than instrumentalising victim–witnesses to further the newspapers’ campaign goals.

Cities of Refuge, Rebel Cities, and the City to Come

2019 ◽  
pp. 253-271
Author(s):  
Giovanna Borradori
Keyword(s):  
Critical Reflection ◽  
Symbolic Capital ◽  
Political Agency ◽  
The Political ◽  
Shared Experience ◽  
The Core ◽  
Political Transformations ◽  
Urban Contexts ◽  
To Come ◽  
The City

As the processes of globalization transform cities into nodes of accumulation of financial and symbolic capital, it is fair to assume that urban contexts have never been more vulnerable to the systemic imperatives of the market. It is thus surprising that cities continue to be the site where the deepest social and political transformations come to the surface. What, then, preserves the city as a space of dissent? The claim of this chapter is that a critical reflection on the political agency of Northern and Southern cities has to start from asking what it means today to occupy the pavement of their streets. The argument explored here is that, in this age of molecular neoliberal encroachment and restructuring, it is a certain experience of dispossession, rather than the quest for identification and recognition, that makes the city the core of a shared experience of refuge and resistance.

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