Dialectic of Enlightenment: Origin Stories of Western Marxism

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael D’Arcy
Keyword(s):  
Origin Stories ◽  
Western Marxism ◽  
Dialectic Of Enlightenment

Karl Marx’s Legacy: The Historical Overview

2007 ◽  
pp. 87-103
Author(s):  
R. Nureev
Keyword(s):  
Marxist Theory ◽  
Neoclassical Economic ◽  
Historical Overview ◽  
Economic Theories ◽  
The Future ◽  
History Of ◽  
Western Marxism

The article is devoted to the history of reception and interpretation of the ideas of Marx and Engels. The author considers the reasons for divergence between Marxist and neoclassical economic theories. He also analyzes the ways of vulgarization of Marx’s theory and the making of Marxist voluntarism. It is shown that the works of Marx and Engels had a certain potential for their over-simplified interpretations. The article also considers academic ("Western") Marxism and evaluates the prospects of Marxist theory in the future.

The Thanatosis of Enlightenment

2019 ◽  
Vol 29 (4) ◽  
pp. 83-106
Keyword(s):  
Scientific Reasoning ◽  
Phenomenological Theory ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
Unsuccessful Attempt ◽  
Trace Back ◽  
Methodological Errors ◽  
Psychological Models ◽  
History Of ◽  
Living Nature ◽  
Dialectic Of Enlightenment

The article analyzes methodological errors Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, particularly their incorrect use of the concepts of mimicry and mimesis. The author of the article maintains that the leaders of the Frankfurt School made a mistake that threatens to undermine their argument when they juxtaposed mimesis and the attraction to death, which has led philosophers to trace back to mimesis the desire for destruction that is found in a civilization constructed by instrumental reasoning. The author reviews the arguments of the Dialectic of Enlightenment and emphasizes the unsuccessful attempt to fuse Freudian and Hegelian methods, which exposes the instability of opposing scientific reasoning to “living” nature. Some amusing quotations from Roger Caillois, who refused to think of mimesis as something entirely rational, are also brought to bear. As Brassier gradually unfolds Adorno and Horkheimer’s thesis, he indicates the consequences of their mistake, which confined thinkers to the bucolic dungeon of “remembering” the authentic nature that they cannot abandon because they have denied themselves access to both reductionist psychological models and to phenomenological theory as such. Brassier delineates the boundaries of this trap and notes the excessive attachment of the Dialectic of Enlightenment to the human. Brassier goes on to describe the prospects for a civilization of enlightenment: a mimesis of death in both senses (death imitates and is imitated) finds its highest expression in the technological automation of the intellect, which for Adorno and Horkheimer means the final implementation of the self-destructive mind. However, for Brassier it means the rewriting of the history of reason in space. This topological rewriting of history, carried out through an enlightenment, reestablishes the dynamics of horror more than mythical temporality: it will become clear that the human mind appears as the dream of a mimetic insect.

Foucault, Lenin, and Western Marxism

2019 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 251-267
Keyword(s):  
Public Intellectual ◽  
Philosophical Tradition ◽  
Real Problem ◽  
Social Changes ◽  
Revolutionary Movement ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Significant Figures ◽  
Marxist Tradition ◽  
Western Marxism

This article others a brief historical account of the complex relationship between Michel Foucault and certain theorists in the Western Marxist philosophical tradition. In the context of the history of the “short twentieth century,” Western Marxism is an intellectual trend based on an interpretation of non-Western revolutionary praxis (by Bolsheviks, Maoists, Guevaristas, etc.). Comparative analysis of several schematic portraits - of Lenin’s revolutionary intellectual, of traditional as opposed to organic intellectuals in Gramsci, and of Foucault’s public intellectual - shows that Foucault in a certain instances was not an external enemy of the Western Marxist tradition, but rather its internal critic. Foucault comes across as a revisionist who engaged in a debate with Lenin about the strategy of the revolutionary movement in France of the 1960s and the 70s. Foucault’s criticism of Leninism unexpectedly turns out to be consistent with the basic struggle of post-WWII Western Marxism to find an alternative to the Bolshevik experience of revolution. This deliberate concurrence makes Foucault one of the significant figures in the history of late Western Marxism, but this becomes a real problem for current historians of neo-Marxist thought when coupled with his generally anti-Marxist views. The article discusses two possible solutions to this problem devised by Perry Anderson and Daniel Bensaid. Anderson’s description of the role of Foucault in the fate of Western Marxism is limited to conceptual questions about the relationship between Marxism and (post) structuralism. Bensaid tries to explain how Foucault fits into the Marxist tradition by appealing to social changes, specifically the changing ideology of capitalist society (in the spirit of The New Spirit of Capitalism by Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello). Building on Bensaid’s work, the article shows the link between Foucault’s position on public intellectuals and the crisis of the revolutionary movement of the last half-century, in particular by reference to the famous “Iranian episode” in Foucault’s biography.

Frankenstein’s Origin-Stories

2020 ◽  
Vol 83 (4) ◽  
pp. 663-690
Author(s):  
Susan J. Wolfson
Keyword(s):  
Origin Stories

scholarly journals Deflecting Privilege: Class Identity and the Intergenerational Self

Sociology ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 003803852098222
Author(s):  
Sam Friedman ◽  
Dave O’Brien ◽  
Ian McDonald
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Lived Experience ◽  
Long Range ◽  
Upward Mobility ◽  
Extended Family ◽  
Class Identity ◽  
Origin Stories ◽  
Class Privilege ◽  
Privileged Class

Why do people from privileged class backgrounds often misidentify their origins as working class? We address this question by drawing on 175 interviews with those working in professional and managerial occupations, 36 of whom are from middle-class backgrounds but identify as working class or long-range upwardly mobile. Our findings indicate that this misidentification is rooted in a self-understanding built on particular ‘origin stories’ which act to downplay interviewees’ own, fairly privileged, upbringings and instead forge affinities to working-class extended family histories. Yet while this ‘intergenerational self’ partially reflects the lived experience of multigenerational upward mobility, it also acts – we argue – as a means of deflecting and obscuring class privilege. By positioning themselves as ascending from humble origins, we show how these interviewees are able to tell an upward story of career success ‘against the odds’ that simultaneously casts their progression as unusually meritocratically legitimate while erasing the structural privileges that have shaped key moments in their trajectory.

scholarly journals Amazonian worlds of other-than-human beings and the Apurinã through the materiality of oral stories

Multilingua ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Pirjo Kristiina Virtanen ◽  
Francisco Apurinã ◽  
Sidney Facundes
Keyword(s):  
Language Documentation ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Linguistic Resources ◽  
Origin Stories ◽  
The People ◽  
Communicative Practice ◽  
History Of ◽  
Origin Story ◽  
Community Meeting ◽  
Southwestern Amazonia

Abstract This article looks at what origin stories teach about the world and what kind of material presence they have in Southwestern Amazonia. We examine the ways the Apurinã relate to certain nonhuman entities through their origin story, and our theoretical approach is language materiality, as we are interested in material means of mediating traditional stories. Analogous to the ways that speakers of many other languages who distinguish the entities that they talk to or about, the Apurinã make use of linguistic resources to establish the ways they interact with different entities. Besides these resources, the material means of mediating stories is a crucial tool to narrate the worlds of humans and nonhumans. Storytelling requires material mediation, and a specific context of plant substances. It also involves community meeting as a space of trust in order to become a communicative practice and effectively introduce the history of the people. Our sources are ethnography, language documentation, and autoethnography.

Oral tradition as emplacement: Ancestral Blackfoot memories of the Rocky Mountain Front

2021 ◽  
pp. 146960532110198
Author(s):  
María Nieves Zedeño ◽  
Evelyn Pickering ◽  
François Lanoë
Keyword(s):  
Oral Tradition ◽  
Rocky Mountain ◽  
Place Making ◽  
Human Presence ◽  
Archaeological Practice ◽  
Intimate Connection ◽  
Origin Stories ◽  
Mountain Front ◽  
Process Event ◽  
Early Human

We highlight the significance of process, event, and context of human practice in Indigenous Creation traditions to integrate Blackfoot “Napi” origin stories with environmental, geological, and archaeological information pertaining to the peopling of the Northwestern Plains, where the northern Rocky Mountain Front may have played a prominent role. First, we discuss the potential and limitations of origin stories generally, and Napi stories specifically, for complementing the fragmentary records of early human presence in the Blackfoot homeland. Second, we demonstrate the intimate connection among processes, events, place-making practices, and stories. Last, we aim to expand multivocality in the interpretation of the deep past through an archaeological practice that considers Indigenous philosophies and stories to be as valid as non-Indigenous ones.

Beer and Racism

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nathaniel Chapman ◽  
David Brunsma
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Racial Ideology ◽  
Historical Trends ◽  
Craft Beer ◽  
Origin Stories ◽  
Beer Industry ◽  
White Institutions ◽  
Theoretical Perspectives ◽  
History Of

Beer in the United States has always been bound up with race, racism, and the construction of white institutions and identities. This unique book carves a much-needed critical and interdisciplinary path to examine and understand the racial dynamics in the craft beer industry and the popular consumption of beer. The book's guiding theoretical perspectives are race and the founding of the United States; racial ideology and the boundaries of Americanity; the production of (beer as) culture; and cultural diversity and brewing. It begins with an overview of the whiteness of craft beer. Looking at the history of beer and its origin stories in the 'new world' shows that beer in the United States has always been bound up with race, racism, and the construction of white institutions and identities. Given the very quick and meteoric rise of the craft beer industry, as well as the myopic scholarly focus on economic and historical trends in the industry, the book states that there is an urgent need to take stock of the intersectional inequalities that such realities gloss over.

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