How Cryptocurrencies Illustrate Erving Goffman’s Take on “False Consciousness”

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francesco Ranci
Keyword(s):  

Author(s):  
Chris Coffman

By reading written and visual artefacts of Gertrude Stein’s life, Gertrude Stein’s Transmasculinity reframes earlier scholarship to argue that her gender was transmasculine and that her masculinity was positive rather than a self-hating form of false consciousness. This book considers ways Stein’s masculinity was formed through her relationship with her feminine partner, Alice B. Toklas, and her masculine homosocial bonds with other modernists in her network. This broadens out Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s account of “male homosocial bonding” to include all masculine persons, opening up the possibility of examining Stein’s relationship to Toklas; masculine women such as Jane Heap; and men such as Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, and Carl Van Vechten. The Introduction and first four chapters focus on surfacings of Stein’s masculinity within the visual and the textual: in others’ paintings and photographs of her person; her hermetic writings from the first three decades of the twentieth century; and her self-packaging for mass consumption in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933). Whereas the chapter on The Autobiography underscores Toklas’s role in the formation of Stein’s masculinity and success as a modernist, the final three register the vicissitudes of the homosocial bonds at play in her friendships with Picasso, Hemingway, and Van Vechten. The Coda, which cross-reads Stein’s Everybody’s Autobiography (1937) with the media attention two museum exhibits about her attracted between 2011 and 2012, points to possibilities for future work on the implications of her masculine homosocial bonds with Vichy collaborator Bernard Fäy.



Somatechnics ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 291-309
Author(s):  
Francis Russell

This paper looks to make a contribution to the critical project of psychiatrist Joanna Moncrieff, by elucidating her account of ‘drug-centred’ psychiatry, and its relation to critical and cultural theory. Moncrieff's ‘drug-centred’ approach to psychiatry challenges the dominant view of mental illness, and psychopharmacology, as necessitating a strictly biological ontology. Against the mainstream view that mental illnesses have biological causes, and that medications like ‘anti-depressants’ target specific biological abnormalities, Moncrieff looks to connect pharmacotherapy for mental illness to human experience, and to issues of social justice and emancipation. However, Moncrieff's project is complicated by her framing of psychopharmacological politics in classical Marxist notions of ideology and false consciousness. Accordingly, she articulates a political project that would open up psychiatry to the subjugated knowledge of mental health sufferers, whilst also characterising those sufferers as beholden to ideology, and as being effectively without knowledge. Accordingly, in order to contribute to Moncrieff's project, and to help introduce her work to a broader humanities readership, this paper elucidates her account of ‘drug-centred psychiatry’, whilst also connecting her critique of biopsychiatry to notions of biologism, biopolitics, and bio-citizenship. This is done in order to re-describe the subject of mental health discourse, so as to better reveal their capacities and agency. As a result, this paper contends that, once reframed, Moncrieff's work helps us to see value in attending to human experience when considering pharmacotherapy for mental illness.





Hypatia ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
Lee Wilson

Abstract Social philosophers often invoke the concept of false consciousness in their analyses, referring to a set of evidence-resistant, ignorant attitudes held by otherwise sound epistemic agents, systematically occurring in virtue of, and motivating them to perpetuate, structural oppression. But there is a worry that appealing to the notion in questions of responsibility for the harm suffered by members of oppressed groups is victim-blaming. Individuals under false consciousness allegedly systematically fail the relevant rationality and epistemic conditions due to structural distortions of reasoning or knowledge practices, undermining their status as responsible moral agents. But attending to the constitutive mechanisms and heterogeneity of false consciousness enables us to see how having it does not in itself render someone an inappropriate target of blame. I focus here on the 1889 antisuffragist manifesto “An Appeal against Female Suffrage,” arguing that its signatories, despite false consciousness, satisfy both conditions for ordinary blameworthiness. I consider three prominent signatories, observing that the irrationality characterization is unsustainable beyond group-level diagnoses, and that their capacity to respond appropriately to reasons was not compromised. Following recent work on epistemic injustice, I also argue that culpable mechanisms constituted their false consciousness, rendering them blameworthy for the Appeal.



2014 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 201-230
Author(s):  
Per Faxneld

The article discusses some of the debates over the construction of gender taking place in the satanic and Left-hand Path (LHP) milieu, in particular the different varieties of upvaluing of “the feminine.” This includes disputes over what the term feminism entails, what the best strategies for women to gain more power are, and if “feminine” is an essence that can be contrasted with a fixed “masculine.” Notions of gender polarity as necessary for magical practice or cosmic balance are given special attention, as are borrowings from feminist terminology (e.g. “patriarchy”) by figures that are far from feminist in orientation. Aside from textual sources, the article draws on communication with 44 informants. Three basic approaches to gender can be discerned in the milieu: 1) Gender as an insignificant category, 2) Gender as a natural polarity, 3) Gender as false consciousness. Of these, number two is the most common, while number one is quite seldom seen—gender is a major issue, one way or another. Femininity is frequently discussed by both men and women, while masculinity is a less popular topic. Femininity, then, is a particularly contested matter in the milieu. Overall, the dominant view of gender is that the two sexes should be strictly dichotomized. The article concludes that with some exceptions most organizations in the milieu are numerically dominated by men. However, some important groups have periodically been led by women, and there are several female key producers of ideology. The partly reactionary views concerning gender issues held by some female leaders indicate that female leadership does not necessitate that a conventional feminism would permeate the organization. Further, it is difficult to see any absolute correlation between female leadership and upvaluing of the feminine in mythology. Moreover, the article demonstrates, such upvaluing does not in itself always signify an underlying ideology of political feminism.



Author(s):  
Bo Wagner Sørensen

Bo Wagner Sørensen: When Culture Gets Embodied: The Notion and Phenomenon of Greenlandic “Halfies’’ The article tries to make sense of the notion of Greenlandic “halfies” by showing how the notion is part of a cultural discourse which is expressed in terms of “between two cultures”. This discourse points both to people being split between cultures and to the cultures having materialized themselves in individual bodies. In light of recent critique of the concept of culture in anthropology it is reasonable to question the essentialism underlying the expression “between two cultures”, and also to imagine that individuals who invoke it are suffering from “false consciousness”. However, it seems that the discourse causes real pain in actual bodies, and therefore it needs to be taken seriously. In the article, the discourse is put in a larger historical, social and political perspective, showing how the idea has been established that Greenlandic and Danish culture and identity are rather incompatible entities. The Greenlandic struggle for political independence has been fought to a large degree in the field of culture, which implies that people in general are informed by dichotomy thinking. Individuals who do not match up with the acknowledged criteria for Greenlandic culture and identity are inclined to be caught between cultures and loyalities, the result being that the political cultural war is reproduced and reflected in individual bodies. Due to the widespread identityhealth model according to which the ideal identity is a clear-cut and fixed ethnic identity, these individuals are often believed to experience identity crises. The article suggests that the “problem” may not be one of incompatible cultural essences, though it is widely thought so, but rather that culture and identity get politicized.  





2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 57-66
Author(s):  
Ida Rosida

Abstrak Artikel ini mengkaji perilaku konsumsi masyarakat urban Jakarta yang dilihat dari sudut pandang kajian budaya. Kajian ini penting karena adanya konsumsi komoditas tiada batas dimana masyarakat urban Jakarta tak mampu menggunakan pikirannya secara tepat untuk memutuskan apa yang harus dan tak harus dikonsumsi. Arus kapitalisme budaya yang berkembang pada era posmodern telah memicu persoalan pada perilaku konsumsi masyarakat yang sengaja dikonstruksi sedemikian rupa sehingga perilaku konsumsi setiap individu dinilai alamiah. Pada kenyataannya, hal tersebut disebabkan oleh kesadaran palsu (false consciousness) yang ditanamkan dalam pikiran manusia melalui ideologi kapitalisme yang berkembang dalam budaya konsumen Indonesia. Kesadaran palsu bukanlah ketidakmampuan pikiran manusia untuk membedakan yang benar atau salah, tetapi kesadaran tersebut dipalsukan oleh mekanisme tertentu, sehingga manusia menyerap informasi yang salah terhadap sebuah realitas.---Abstract The article investigates consumerism as a life style of Jakarta urban society through a cultural studies view. This study is important due to the fact that Jakarta urban society keep consuming commodities without any consideration on what should and shouldn’t be consumed. The development of cultural capitalism in postmodern era has led to a serious problem on how consumer behaviour is intentionally constructed in a such way and seems to be natural. In fact, this is caused by a false consciousness which is placed in the human mind through capitalism in Indonesia consumer culture. False consciousness in not defined as a disability of human mind to distinguish right and false, but the consciousness is counterfeited by a certain mechanism, so that human reserves wicked  information through a reality.



2013 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-30
Author(s):  
Adi Schnytzer ◽  
Sara Westreich

In general, models in finance assume that investors are risk averse. An example of such a recent model is the pioneering work of Aumann and Serrano, which presents an economic index of riskiness of gambles which is independent of wealth and holds (as might be understood from the adjective “economic”) for exclusively risk averse investors. In their paper, they discuss gambles with positive expected returns which will be accepted or rejected by agents which different levels of risk aversion. The question never asked by the authors (and in most of the finance literature) is: Who is offering these attractive gambles? To arrive at an answer, we extend the Aumann-Serrano risk index in such a way that it accommodates gambles with either positive or negative expectations and is thus suitable for both the risk averse and risk lovers.  Once we allow for the existence of risk lovers, it may be shown that in financial markets, many gambles with negative expectations are taken either knowingly or unknowingly so that there are always people that act as if they are risk lovers. The paper concludes with a brief discussion of the implications of our result, in particular that gambling is by no means restricted to the casino or the track.



2017 ◽  
Vol 28 (3) ◽  
pp. 265
Author(s):  
Flavius Floris Andries

Political representation and symbolic violence through discourse Seram as Nusa Ina (Mother Island) are interesting phenomenon to be studied. This research was conducted with a qualitative method by in-depth interview and participation observation which aims to know how does this discourse view. The cultural study was applied in order to comprehend the manners of creating, producing, and disseminating the meanings from the perspective of non-Seram society and what their views on the discourse in understanding Moluccas universal identity. The process of data analysis by using the cultural studies approach generated the findings i.e the Nunusaku myth that legitimizes and strengthens Seram as Nusa Ina in society, and that there was a significant influence of myth and discourse in Moluccas identity formation universally in the form of folk songs or reliefs that always shade of Seram in represents the Moluccans. The discourse of Seram as Nusa Ina for the community of non-Seram, especially for Southeast people, is not substantial because they do not have emotional connection or relationship with the genealogy and cultural discourse. They have the other myth and the other own discourse about the myth itself such as Vernusang Island which was sinking in the formation of people’s live in the Southeast. Therefore, the discourse of Seram as Nusa Ina which is forced to become a part of the discourse of Southeast People is a form of a false consciousness as well as form of political representation and symbolic violence.



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