scholarly journals Lunch of the last human: Nutritionally complete food and the fantasies of market-based progress

2020 ◽  
pp. 147059312091470 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Cronin ◽  
James Fitchett
Keyword(s):  
Ideological Fantasy

In this article, we integrate Nietzsche’s visions of self-overcoming with a Žižekian toolbox to explore how ‘market-based progress’ is upheld through a fabric of ideological fantasies. Through an analysis of Huel, a nutritionally complete British food brand aligned with progressive and techno-utopian discourses, we reveal a fantasmatic structure centred on pragmatism, the search for unassailable truth and continuance of a prehistoric legacy. These fantasies function as illusory support for acceptance that humanity’s great overcoming is singularly achieved through market logic and ethos. Here, a fetishistic inversion centres on subjects believing that the detached spectatorialism of consumption is closer to the act of the Nietzschean ‘Overhuman’ than it is to its inverse, the ‘last human’. This article provides the parameters for how ideological fantasy insulates the market from its material deadlocks and concludes with a conceptualization of the post-sovereign consumer’s subjectification along the fantastical contours of market-based progress.

scholarly journals Climate Change Inaction and Optimism

Philosophies ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 61
Author(s):  
Philip J. Wilson
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Economic Growth ◽  
Collective Action ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Collective Action Problem ◽  
The Public ◽  
Policy Context ◽  
Positive Action ◽  
Ideological Fantasy

The problem of climate change inaction is sometimes said to be ‘wicked’, or essentially insoluble, and it has also been seen as a collective action problem, which is correct but inconsequential. In the absence of progress, much is made of various frailties of the public, hence the need for an optimistic tone in public discourse to overcome fatalism and encourage positive action. This argument is immaterial without meaningful action in the first place, and to favour what amounts to the suppression of truth over intellectual openness is in any case disreputable. ‘Optimism’ is also vexed in this context, often having been opposed to the sombre mood of environmentalists by advocates of economic growth. The greater mental impediments are ideological fantasy, which is blind to the contradictions in public discourse, and the misapprehension that if optimism is appropriate in one social or policy context it must be appropriate in others. Optimism, far from spurring climate change action, fosters inaction.

Who is pulling the strings in the platform economy? Accounting for the dark and unexpected sides of algorithmic control

Organization ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 135050842097452
Author(s):  
Edouard Pignot
Keyword(s):  
Digital Control ◽  
Central Place ◽  
Dark Side ◽  
Theoretical Contribution ◽  
Ethical Implications ◽  
Labour Process ◽  
Structuralist Theory ◽  
Ideological Fantasy ◽  
Platform Economy ◽  
The Way

This paper aims to address the dark side perspective on digital control and surveillance by emphasizing the affective grip of ideological control, namely the process that silently ensures the subjugation of digital labour, and which keeps the ‘unexpectedness’ of algorithmic practices at bay: that is, the propensity of users to contest digital prescriptions. In particular, the theoretical contribution of this paper is to combine Labour Process with psychoanalytically-informed, post-structuralist theory, in order to connect to, and further our understanding of, how and why digital workers assent to, or oppose, the interpellations of algorithmic ideology at work. To illustrate the operation of affective control in the Platform Economy, the emblematic example of ride-hailing platforms, such as Uber, and their algorithmic management, is revisited. Thus, the empirical section describes the way drivers are glued to the algorithm (e.g. for one more fare, or for the next surge pricing) in a way that prevents them, although not always, from considering genuine resistance to management. Finally, the paper discusses the central place of ideological fantasy and cynical enjoyment in the Platform Economy, as well as the ethical implications of the study.

Property and Selfhood in Herman Melville's Pierre

2006 ◽  
Vol 61 (2) ◽  
pp. 171-199
Author(s):  
Jeffory A. Clymer
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Herman Melville ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Upstate New York ◽  
Property Relations ◽  
Urban Market ◽  
The Family ◽  
Ideological Fantasy ◽  
Landed Gentry ◽  
Market Relations

In Pierre; or, the Ambiguities (1852) Herman Melville analyzes the intricacies of subjectivity and economics by way of two concrete and quite different forms of antebellum American property relations-the residual estates of the landed gentry in upstate New York and the emergent urban market economy of New York City. A condition of unassailability,of timelessness and imperviousness, infuses the family estate in Pierre, while incessant exchange characterizes the novel's urban finale. Taken together, these opposed economic arrangements represent Melville's meditation on how the very concept of alienability, the definitive aspect of modern property relations, impacted forms of non-slave identity in the antebellum United States. The condition of inalienability that structures the patrimonial estates presents the initially attractive possibility of removal from the turbulent world of property relations, exchange, and commodification,but it turns out to be an ideological fantasy supported primarily by violence and death. Melville, always one to brood about selfhood, and faced in Pierre with his realization of the rottenness at the core of his fantasy of a subjectivity not riven by alienability,responds with the novel's urban section. This second portion of the novel presents market relations as a horror wreaked principally on the self. Pierre, ultimately, represents Melville's monument to the desirability, and his dismay at the impossibility, of imagining identity outside the syntax of a market economy's version of property relations.

Like a Film: Ideological Fantasy on Screen, Camera, and Canvas

1995 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 112-114
Author(s):  
Pamela Robertson
Keyword(s):  
Ideological Fantasy

scholarly journals A Tale of Two Teachers: A Duoethnography of the Realistic and Idealistic Successes and Failures of Teaching English as An International Language

RELC Journal ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 49 (1) ◽  
pp. 88-101 ◽  
Author(s):  
Heath Rose ◽  
Anuchaya Montakantiwong
Keyword(s):  
English Language ◽  
Language Teachers ◽  
Teaching English ◽  
English As Foreign Language ◽  
International Language ◽  
Innovative Methodology ◽  
Language Classrooms ◽  
English Language Teachers ◽  
Autobiographical Accounts ◽  
Ideological Fantasy

With the growth of English worldwide there have been numerous calls for a paradigm shift from teaching English as foreign language to teaching English as an international language (EIL). While there is a growing body of conceptual literature for teaching EIL, the voices of teachers remain severely underrepresented in this movement. As such, current EIL research is missing the perspective of this key stakeholder, who is in a prime position to report ‘on-the-ground’ challenges of integrating EIL approaches into English language classrooms. This article addresses this gap by offering an in-depth joint autoethnography of two English language teachers, who actively experimented with EIL-informed pedagogy at universities in Japan and Thailand, and who provide very different tales of the resulting challenges and successes. Data was collected via a duoethnographic approach, an innovative methodology which presents two juxtaposing dialogic narratives in order to show readers in-depth, personal and autobiographical accounts from both teachers’ experiences. Analysis of these narratives provides an illustration of the issues surrounding the implementation of research-informed innovations into ELT classrooms. The findings are discussed in terms of whether teaching EIL is a possible reality, or whether it remains an ideological fantasy.

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