Marx and Me

2021 ◽  
pp. 194277862110361
Author(s):  
Sarah Glynn
Keyword(s):  
Political Activism ◽  
Social Structures ◽  
Bottom Up ◽  
Human Relationships ◽  
The World ◽  
Freedom Movement ◽  
Cultural Turn ◽  
As If ◽  
The Way

This is the story of how I encountered Marxism and how I have used it to make sense of the world, and hence to inform my political activism. I describe how humanist materialism has helped me interrogate social structures so as to discover underlying interacting forces and the role played by human praxis and understandings. On the way, I examine debates about the researcher as outsider; criticisms of political multiculturalism; difficulties of being a Marxist after the cultural turn when many academics will no longer even engage with Marxist arguments; problems in writing about and working with Islamists; struggles to excavate housing studies from being buried in policy detail; uncomfortable truths about immigration and the reserve army of labour; and warnings from the failure of revolutionary stages theory. I end with lessons from the Kurdish freedom movement on human relationships and bottom-up democracy, and with its inspirational example of a society attempting to live as if in the early days of a better world.

scholarly journals Knowledge and competence for a networked world

2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Nina Bonderup Dohn
Keyword(s):  
User Involvement ◽  
Bottom Up ◽  
The World ◽  
Design For Learning ◽  
Keynote Speech ◽  
The Way

KEYNOTE SPEECH. The world of today may be viewed as networked, both socially and technologically, with characteristics such as globalization, mobility of people across contexts, bottom-up user involvement, interweaving of physical and virtual contexts, and general pervasiveness of ICT.  In her talk, Nina analyzes the competence demands which are posed on citizens in a networked world. She argues for a view of knowledge as a unity of experiential, practical, and propositional aspects, realized concretely in relation to the demands of the situation, yet points out that in a networked world, people are continuously required to use knowledge, learned in one setting, in new contexts. This raises the question of how people transform and resituate knowledge across contexts. Finally, Nina discusses implications of her talk for design for learning the knowledge and competence required. Throughout the talk, she will engage in discussion with participants about the way her  heoretical points plays out in library practice and which roles libraries and librarians can have as facilitators of others’ development of knowledge and competence for a networked world.

Architecture and memory in W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz

2015 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-48
Author(s):  
Naomi Stead
Keyword(s):  
Human Life ◽  
Social Structures ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Emotional Life ◽  
Literary Expression ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The World ◽  
Personal Level ◽  
Bear Witness ◽  
The Way

Austerlitz was the German expatriate author W. G. Sebald’s last book before his untimely death in 2001. Greeted with great critical acclaim, the novel is a profound meditation on history, memory, and loss. Sebald’s larger attempt to represent and memorialise the lasting trauma of the Holocaust, in an oblique and understated rather than a literal way, led him to a new kind of literary expression described by Eric Homberger as ‘part hybrid novel, part memoir and part travelogue’. What is most interesting about Austerlitz, for the purposes of this article, is that it makes so much use of architecture. In this, it joins a tradition of literary works that treat architecture as a metaphor for human endeavour and artifice, social structures, and attempts to order and construct the world. But, there is more to the buildings in Austerlitz. The book offers insights into the larger meaning – often, but not always, melancholy – of architecture in culture and society, past and present. This is elucidated at a personal level, in the way that surroundings and spatial atmospheres can affect the emotional life of an individual, and also at a collective level, in the way that buildings bear witness to, and last beyond, the trials and duration of a single human life.

of supposing that there are intrinsic qualitative features of mental representations—I doubt that this is a mistake—but the mistake of supposing that these intrinsic qualitative features represent the world by mirroring or picturing it so that representation goes first and foremost by way of intrinsic similarity. What could be intrinsically similar to an array of sense qualities across a sense field? Answer: an array of qualities across space and time. If this is what is primarily represented by a perceptual representation then the problem is how it is we arrive at representational contents to the effect that there are persisting objects. The natural answer is that we derive such contents; it is as if we infer them demonstratively or non-demonstratively from what is primarily represented. So persisting objects are either constructions out of distributions of qualities or the inferred causes of such distributions. It is this whole empiricist problematic which must be rejected. Representation is our characteristic activity. What justifies a particular kind of representation or judgement made immediately as a result of perceptual experience is not that it mirrors or pictures or is intrinsically similar to an independently characterizable reality but that it is the representation or judgement which we would standardly and non-collusively make under just those conditions of perceptual experience. So it is with perceptual judgements of persistence. We spontaneously and non-collusively make them on the basis of perceptual experience. Although particular judgements of persistence may be overturned by the discovery of the sort of trickery mentioned above, the overturning takes place by means of accounting for the illusory appearance of persistence as due to the causal powers of a more inclusive framework of persisting objects. The global commitment to the effect that the world is made up of persisting objects is not a reasoned consequence of some prior commitment to the effect that the world contains at least distributions of qualities over space­ time. It is something we spontaneously and dogmatically employ as a fundamental theme in our everyday representation of the way the world is. How do we earn the right to this dogmatism? How do we earn the right to spontaneously go in for representations as of persisting objects? (By what right do we so synthesize the

2013 ◽  
pp. 216-217
Keyword(s):  
Perceptual Experience ◽  
Mental Representations ◽  
Causal Powers ◽  
Perceptual Representation ◽  
Space And Time ◽  
The World ◽  
The Right ◽  
As If ◽  
The Way

scholarly journals Når værk bliver til vold

2008 ◽  
Vol 36 (105) ◽  
pp. 102-127
Author(s):  
Lars Albinus
Keyword(s):  
Political Activism ◽  
European History ◽  
Politics And Religion ◽  
History Of Art ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Way

When Work is Violence:Drawing on examples as divergent as current Muslim responses to the Danish cartoons and German terrorism in the 70s, this article aims to show how a closed alliance between art, politics and religion carries the risk of inducing violence which, among other things, annuls the function of art as being inherently ambiguous.It is argued that the function of art in Islam is bound up with the inviolable authority of the prophet and is therefore basically unable to fulfil satiric purposes. Although satire and laughter were also confined to unofficial activities under the Roman Church in medieval times, it is claimed, along the lines of Bakhtin, that a ‘culture of laughter’ actually did survive in the European history of art and paved the way for the appreciation of the potential of satirical critique. Following Benjamin, it is further claimed that the post-auratic function of art joined up with the revolutionary hope for a new aesthetics of life contrary to the fragmentary world of urban capitalism. Finally, as its major case, the article discusses the sliding of aesthetic provocation into political activism in 70s Germany resulting in Urban terrorism. In this case, the function of art once again falls back into a totalitarian critique which merely acknowledges a singular picture of the world. In conclusion, it is pointed out that aesthetic expressions are only imbued with an anti-violent vitality due to a non-condemning, ambiguous openness.

XII. Narrative and Perspective; Values and Appropriate Emotions

2003 ◽  
Vol 52 ◽  
pp. 201-220 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Goldie
Keyword(s):  
The World ◽  
As If ◽  
The Way

To the realists.—You sober people who feel well armed against passion and fantasies and would like to turn your emptiness into a matter of pride and ornament: you call yourselves realists and hint that the world really is the way it appears to you. As if reality stood unveiled before you only, and you yourselves were perhaps the best part of it … But in your unveiled state are not even you still very passionate and dark creatures compared to fish, and still far too similar to an artist in love? And what is ‘reality’ for an artist in love? You are still burdened with those estimates of things that have their origin in the passions and loves of former centuries. Your sobriety still contains a secret and inextinguishable drunkenness. Your love of ‘reality’, for example-—oh, that is a primeval ‘love’ … Subtract the phantasm and every human contribution from it, my sober friends! If you can! If you can forget your descent, your past, your training—all of your humanity and animality. (F. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Book Two, extract from Section 57)

9. Changing People: Green Consciousness

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
John S. Dryzek
Keyword(s):  
Discourse Analysis ◽  
Deep Ecology ◽  
Social Structures ◽  
Economic Systems ◽  
Green Movement ◽  
Ecological Citizenship ◽  
The World ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Way

This chapter examines a category of green radicalism that focuses on green consciousness. The stress on green consciousness means that the way people experience and regard the world in which they live, and each other, is the key to green change. Once consciousness has changed in an appropriate direction, then policies, social structures, institutions, and economic systems are expected to fall into place. This prioritization of consciousness is widespread in the green movement, among deep ecologists, bioregionalists, ecofeminists, ecotheologists, and lifestyle greens, among others. The chapter begins with a discussion of deep ecology, ecofeminism, bioregionalism, ecological citizenship, lifestyle greens, and ecotheology. It then considers romanticism, the discourse analysis of green consciousness, and the impact of green consciousness change. Finally, it highlights the challenges confronting green consciousness.

scholarly journals Physicalism, Not Scientism

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alyssa Ney
Keyword(s):  
Half Century ◽  
The Past ◽  
Past Half Century ◽  
The World ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Philosophical Community ◽  
Past Half ◽  
As If ◽  
The Way

Although physicalism has been a received view in the philosophical community over the past half-century, scientism is by contrast a much more maligned position. And yet standard formulations of physicalism, as the view that the world is in totality the way physics says it is, can make physicalism look as if it is simply a reductionistic form of scientism. This chapter argues that attention to more subtle formulations of physicalism reveals the difference between these attitudes.

Whitehead's intellectual adventure

1999 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 63-75
Author(s):  
Lewis S. Ford
Keyword(s):  
Single Unit ◽  
Dark Side ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Infinitely Divisible ◽  
Temporal Experience ◽  
Concept Of God ◽  
Concepts Of God ◽  
The World ◽  
As If ◽  
The Way

This article traces Whitehead's own adventure of ideas, . especially the way in which he gradually worked out his concept of God. This adventure had its own dark side. Whitehead was impatient with the process of preparing his manuscript for publication. In Science and the Modern World, he left his original lectures intact, even though his additions espouse a very different orientation to time. The original lectures are about events, each infinitely divisible, while the additions examine occasions, which are atomistic and not further divisible without loss of actuality. This is often overlooked because we tend to assume a book should represent a single unit of interpretation. In this case the book is read as if it were all about occasions, when most of the book is about events. In Process and Reality Whitehead determined to leave everything he had written intact, even though he seems to have changed his mind on crucial points some 13 times. Because all these passages are simply placed side by side, they offer valuable clues as to his intellectual adventure, which is examined in this essay in terms of its three successive concepts of God: God as non-temporal, as the conceptual realization of all forms and as the temporal experience of the world.

Tradition and Transformation: Continuity and Ingenuity in the Temples of Karnataka

2001 ◽  
Vol 60 (2) ◽  
pp. 180-199 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adam Hardy
Keyword(s):  
Eleventh Century ◽  
World View ◽  
Formal Analysis ◽  
Evolutionary Pattern ◽  
South Indian ◽  
Southwest India ◽  
The World ◽  
Architectural Language ◽  
As If ◽  
The Way

A continuous tradition of Drāviḍa (south Indian) temple architecture flourished in Karnataka, southwest India, between the seventh and thirteenth centuries. This article focuses on the eleventh-century temples, arguing that the later forms can only be understood in relation to the constantly developing tradition, looked at as a whole. A formal analysis is put forward, based primarily on the evidence of the monuments themselves. From the monuments, an appropriate way of seeing can be deduced, allowing an understanding of both individual temple compositions and of the way in which the forms evolve. A clear evolutionary pattern emerges, tending toward dynamism and fusion. Seen retrospectively, there is a sense of inevitability, as if the inherent potential of the architectural language is unfolding. Yet there is great inventiveness. The article illustrates the nature of this inventiveness and discusses its relationship to the evolutionary pattern. It concludes that it was not fixed forms that were passed down, but a way of creating, and that the sense of evolutionary direction this produced can be understood in relation to the world view the temples embody.

scholarly journals Dis-origined Materials: The Role and Invisibilization of Extraction in Technoscience

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emma McKay
Keyword(s):  
Electronic Devices ◽  
Core Element ◽  
The Earth ◽  
The World ◽  
As If ◽  
The Way

In new materialist STS, researchers recognize and investigate the liveliness, agency, and ongoing historicity of matter in the lab. Through the work of extraction studies, we know that much of this matter is violently pulled from the ground—the metals in electronic devices, for instance, were cut out of the earth. Previous work in new materialist STS has critiqued the construction of the ‘object’ as obscuring how things work and are made, yet the role of extraction in things has gone largely unacknowledged. In this paper, I argue that extraction is a core element of contemporary technoscience. I define the term dis-origining to analytically describe the way that objects are made to seem as if they come from nowhere, within and far beyond the STS literature, comparing this term with related concepts including Haraway’s (1988) god-trick and Marx’s commodity fetish. Seeing extraction in the world around us and naming the ways that socio-ecologies have been invisibilized may help us address the immense violences wrought in making contemporary technosciences.

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