Idle Power: the Riot, the Commune, and Capitalist Time in Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day

2019 ◽  
pp. 157-204
Author(s):  
Christian P. Haines
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Organization ◽  
Class Struggle ◽  
The United States ◽  
Idle Power ◽  
Social Forms ◽  
The Social ◽  
Antonio Negri

This chapter argues that Thomas Pynchon’s novel Against the Day (2006) not only represents the temporality of capitalism but also contests it through an aesthetic strategy of idleness or sloth. It analyzes how Pynchon recuperates nineteenth-century traditions of anarchism, work refusal, rioting, and the commune as a way of responding to contemporary conditions of labor under capitalism. Putting Pynchon into conversation with the Italian Autonomist Marxists—most notably, Antonio Negri and Mario Tronti—it shows how Against the Day frames class struggle as a conflict between capitalism and workers regarding the social organization of time. It explains that Pynchon links the utopian reinvention of the United States to a political version of idleness, or a willful refusal of capitalist efficiency. It also situates Pynchon’s utopian imagination in respect to the social forms of the riot and the commune.

The Social Organization of Sexuality. Sexual Practices in the United States

Population ◽  
1997 ◽  
Vol 52 (6) ◽  
pp. 1548 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alain Giami ◽  
E. O. Laumann ◽  
J. H. Gagnon ◽  
R. T. Michael ◽  
S. Michaels ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Social Organization ◽  
The United States ◽  
Sexual Practices ◽  
The Social

Americanism Redux

2020 ◽  
pp. 184-208
Author(s):  
D. G. Hart
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
The United States ◽  
Roman Catholicism ◽  
The Social ◽  
Constitutional Republic ◽  
Political Realities ◽  
The Church ◽  
Church Teaching

This chapter investigates the use of Americanism to appropriate Roman Catholicism for the good of a nation. It recounts older Roman Catholic heresy claimed that the American political system was not at odds with church teaching, even though the United States seemed to stand for most of the social and political realities that nineteenth-century popes had condemned. It also talks about the Americanists in the nineteenth-century who argued that Vatican officials misread the United States, stating that the nation was far friendlier to Roman Catholicism than Europeans imagined. The chapter details how Americanists urged the church to update its polity to the nation's political sensibilities, a strategy that would make Roman Catholicism look less odd in the United States. It also highlights ways Americanists adapt Roman Catholicism to life in a secular, constitutional republic.

Misinformation and Ideology

2021 ◽  
pp. 111-126
Author(s):  
Scott Timcke
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Ethical Reasoning ◽  
The United States ◽  
Social Hierarchy ◽  
The Other ◽  
Ruling Class ◽  
Social Forms ◽  
The Social ◽  
The One

This chapter applies theoretical insights around misrecognition to better understand the intersection of misinformation and ideology in the United States. It argues that misinformation practices are products of modernity. American modernity is characterized by contradictions between its basic social forms such as the money form, the commodity form, and so on. The contradictions create a bind for rulers. On the one hand, these contradictions mean that their rule is never stable. On the other hand, acknowledging the contradictions risks courting redress that also threatens their minority rule. Due to the imperative to mystify these contradictions, social problems are subsequently treated as anomalies or otherwise externalized; they can never be features of the capitalist political economy itself. Misinformation is a common by-product of this externalization as the capitalist ruling class uses it to weld together pacts and alliances that preserve the social hierarchy. The chapter outlines the broad argumentation offered by securocrats, reactionaries and technologists on Russia-gate. It takes a look at the proof put forward, the ethical reasoning invoked and the emotive appeals employed. It also looks at why these explanations fall short.

Warring for America

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
Physical Parameters ◽  
School Students ◽  
Cultural Productions ◽  
Political Independence ◽  
The Social ◽  
New Nation ◽  
The Many

The aftershocks of the American Revolution reverberated through the early nineteenth century, leaving the new country unsettled and at odds with itself. The essays in Warring for America offer a kaleidoscope of perspectives on the internal divisions amongst the inhabitants of the early Republic that hindered the emergence of a coherent American nation as much as did the lingering impact of British imperial influence. Traditional understanding of the War of 1812 era as a moment that reaffirmed the political independence of the United States, thereby ushering in a neat period of stability, have failed to explain the enduring struggle to define the social and physical parameters of the new nation that dominated much of the nineteenth century. By turning from high politics to cultural productions and material problems, the authors in this volume explore the many social and economic conflicts within the United States that were fought on cultural terrain. Wartime calls for unity only cast into sharper relief the arduous efforts of varied Americans to control the terms of inclusion or exclusion within their country. From presidents to African Free School students, from hack magazine writers to Choctaw mothers, Americans fought for country on the battleground of belonging.

The Comic Grotesque

2020 ◽  
pp. 29-66
Author(s):  
Jean Lee Cole
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New York ◽  
Social Order ◽  
The United States ◽  
Comic Strip ◽  
Melting Pot ◽  
Logical Basis ◽  
Ethnic Populations ◽  
The Social

A particularly grotesque form of the comic sensibility emerged in the closing years of the nineteenth century in the works of George Luks. Luks was called on to take over Richard Outcault’s phenomenally popular Yellow Kid comic strip at Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World in 1896; he soon made the Yellow Kid his own. As Outcault’s duplicate or twin, Luks capitalized on the grotesque potential of twinning, doubling, and replication to question the social order from below, laying bare—and then savagely mocking—fears of the rapidly growing immigrant and ethnic populations in the United States. In subsequent strips, including The Little Nippers and Mose’s Incubator, his representations of polyglot America become positively fantastical, even monstrous, reflecting the interchangeability and reproducibility of ethnic identity that formed the logical basis of the “melting pot.”

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