Thinking through feeling: critical theory and the affective turn

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon Mussell
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Critical Theory ◽  
Recent Work ◽  
Social Research ◽  
Affect Theory ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Social ◽  
New Materialisms

Chapter 1 sets out the theoretical terrain on which the wider project is based. It begins by revisiting some of the founding tenets of critical theory in the context of the establishment of the Institute for Social Research in the early twentieth century. The chapter then discusses contemporary theories of affect that have emerged in the past couple of decades as part of the so-called ‘new materialisms’. Taking on board some of the key findings of this recent work on affect, the author also highlights the potential political deficiencies that accompany such accounts, particularly within a growing ‘post-critical’ context. The chapter closes with suggestions as to how early critical theory – read through an affective lens – might provide the social and political grounding that affect theory often lacks, while at the same time noting how theories of affect are invaluable in shedding light on the efficacy of the pre- or extra-rational, so often sacrificed on the altar of political philosophy.

Protest in the Playhouse: Two Twentieth-Century Audience Riots

1996 ◽  
Vol 12 (48) ◽  
pp. 323-332 ◽  
Author(s):  
Athenaide Dallett
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Western World ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Social ◽  
The University ◽  
University Of Connecticut

Theatre historians are now reconsidering traditional attitudes towards ‘theatre riots’ of the past, in the light of the new perception of ‘mob’ activity pioneered by the social historian George Rudé. Here, Athenaide Dallett looks at two more recent audience revolts – the well-documented riots at the opening of Synge's The Playboy of the Western World in Dublin in 1907, and the indignant response of Berkeley students in 1968 to the Living Theatre's presumption in Paradise Now, in lecturing them about a revolution already taking place on the streets. In both cases, she suggests, riots were provoked by a breach of the contract between performers and audience, taken as legitimating a revolutionary response by such social theorists as Locke and Rousseau. Athenaide Dallett, who recently gained her doctorate from Harvard, teaches at the University of Connecticut at Torrington, and is currently working on a study of the connections between political philosophy and theatre.

The Obligation to Choose

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachel Crossland
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Close Attention ◽  
The Past ◽  
Light Quanta ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Wave Particle Duality ◽  
Night And Day ◽  
Scientific Ideas

Chapter 1 explores Woolf’s writings up to the end of 1925 in relation to scientific ideas on wave-particle duality, providing the ‘retrospect of Woolf’s earlier novels’ which Michael Whitworth has suggested shows that she was working ‘in anticipation of the physicists’. The chapter as a whole challenges this idea of anticipation, showing that Woolf was actually working in parallel with physicists, philosophers, and artists in the early twentieth century, all of whom were starting to question dualistic models and instead beginning to develop complementary ones. A retrospect on wave-particle duality is also provided, making reference to Max Planck’s work on quanta and Albert Einstein’s development of light quanta. This chapter pays close attention to Woolf’s writing of light and her use of conjunctions, suggesting that Woolf was increasingly looking to write ‘both/and’ rather than ‘either/or’. Among other texts, it considers Night and Day, Mrs Dalloway, and ‘Sketch of the Past’.

Professional judgements of risk and capacity in situations of self-neglect among older people

2010 ◽  
Vol 30 (6) ◽  
pp. 1055-1072 ◽  
Author(s):  
SHANNON MCDERMOTT
Keyword(s):  
Critical Theory ◽  
Older People ◽  
Cultural Context ◽  
Sociological Theory ◽  
Qualitative Interviews ◽  
Medical Illness ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Social ◽  
Professional Intervention ◽  
Sydney Australia

ABSTRACTOver the past 50 years, self-neglect among older people has been conceptualised in both social policy and the academy as a social problem which is defined in relation to medical illness and requires professional intervention. Few authors, however, have analysed the concept of self-neglect in relation to critical sociological theory. This is problematic because professional judgements, which provide the impetus for intervention, are inherently influenced by the social and cultural context. The purpose of this article is to use critical theory as a framework for interpreting the findings from a qualitative study which explored judgements in relation to older people in situations of self-neglect made by professionals. Two types of data were collected. There were 125 hours of observations at meetings and home assessments conducted by professionals associated with the Community Options Programme in Sydney, Australia, and 18 professionals who worked with self-neglecting older people in the community gave in-depth qualitative interviews. The findings show that professional judgements of self-neglect focus on risk and capacity, and that these perceptions influence when and how interventions occur. The assumptions upon which professional judgements are based are then further analysed in relation to critical theory.

School Notes: Committee on Historical Studies

1987 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 233-236
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Social Research ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
Processes Of Change ◽  
Graduate Faculty ◽  
New School ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Scientific ◽  
Historical Moment

The Committee on Historical Studies was established in the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research in 1984. The Graduate Faculty has long emphasized the contribution of history to the social sciences. Committee on Historical Studies (CHS) courses offer students the opportunity to utilize social scientific concepts and theories in the study of the past. The program is based on the conviction that the world changes constantly but changes systematically, with each historical moment setting the opportunities and limiting the potentialities of the next. Systematic historical analysis, however, is not merely a diverting luxury. Nor is it simply a means of assembling cases for present-oriented models of human behavior. It is a prerequisite to any sound understanding of processes of change and of structures large or small.

Conclusion

2018 ◽  
pp. 189-206
Author(s):  
Michael P. Roller
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Control ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Symbolic Violence ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Social ◽  
Semiotic Systems ◽  
Oppressed Group

The conclusion revisits the three major inquiries addressed in the text, drawing together the evidence and contexts provided in the previous seven chapters. The first investigates the role of objective settings, such as the systemic and symbolic violence of landscapes and semiotic systems of racialization in justifying or triggering moments of explicit subjective violence such as the Lattimer Massacre. The second inquiry, traces the trajectory of immigrant groups into contemporary patriotic neoliberal subjects. In other terms, it asks how an oppressed group can become complicit with oppression later in history. The third inquiry traces the development of soft forms of social control and coercion across the longue durée of the twentieth century. Specifically, it asks how vertically integrated economic and governmental structures such as neoliberalism and governmentality which serve to stabilize the social antagonisms of the past are enunciated in everyday life.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anastasia Marinopoulou
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Critical Theory ◽  
Systems Theory ◽  
Critical Realism ◽  
Frankfurt School ◽  
First Century ◽  
Late Modernity ◽  
Scientific Philosophy ◽  
The Social ◽  
Political Epistemology

Critical Theory and Epistemology is a comparison of the major epistemological concerns in the twentieth century with critical theory of the Frankfurt School. I focus on modern epistemology as a theory of and about science that also addresses the social and political aims of scientific enquiry.The critique that the book deploys on the epistemological tendencies of late modernity suggests that the main distinction between Kant and the critical theorists lies in their understanding of rationality. Such a critique can be characterized as the ‘battle’ of modern epistemology for or against the scientifically, socially and politically rational. Thus, arguments of modern epistemology, as articulated by phenomenology, structuralism, poststructuralism, modernists and postmodernists, systems’ theory and critical realism, can certainly be considered ‘modern’ in historical terms, but in essence their concerns are of a pre-modern and pre-scientific nature. In such a manner, we come closer to understanding what constitutes the scientific, philosophy, truth, and whether modern epistemology paves the way for a political epistemology in the twenty-first century.

Horkheimer, Max (1895–1973)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Edgar
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
Critical Theory ◽  
Social Research ◽  
Social Systems ◽  
The Political ◽  
Pablo Picasso ◽  
Columbia University ◽  
The Social ◽  
Critical Theorist ◽  
The University

Born near Stuttgart, Germany, the philosopher Max Horkheimer, who obtained his doctorate from the University of Frankfurt, is best known as a leader of the Frankfurt School, along with Theodor W. Adorno and Jürgen Habermas. From 1930 to 1958 (with a significant hiatus from 1934 to 1948), Horkheimer served as the Director of the Institut für Sozialforschung (Frankfurt Institute for Social Research), founded in 1923 to promote multidisciplinary research in the social sciences with a particular focus on Marxian thought; along with his colleague Adorno, Horkheimer was responsible for developing the distinctive form of Marxist philosophy that framed this research through the methodologies of German critical theory. Instead of just describing social systems through "objective" means, critical theory would endeavor to uncover the social context and raise questions about truth and social justice, acknowledging also that critical theory cannot produce universal truths. At best, the critical theorist simply expresses the contradictions and falsehoods of the society within which they work. Critical theory was applied in a sweeping analysis of Western civilization in Dialektik der Aufklärung (1947; Dialectic of Enlightenment), in which Adorno and Horkheimer argued that the progress of enlightened Western culture was simultaneously a regression into a new barbarism and an entanglement in myth. In modernist art, such as the work of James Joyce and Pablo Picasso, Horkheimer identified a crucial source of resistance to the political and economic oppression of late capitalist society. Horkheimer, who was Jewish, escaped Nazi Germany and taught at Columbia University from 1935 to 1941; he lived in Los Angeles during the 1940s, but eventually returned to Germany where died in Nuremburg in 1973.

Living with Disasters: Perspectives on the (Re-)Production of Knowledge

2017 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-7 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hannah Swee ◽  
Zuzana Hrdličková
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
General Public ◽  
Loss Of Life ◽  
Production Of Knowledge ◽  
Cultural Aspects ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
Local Agencies ◽  
Consequent Increase

Although communities around the world have been experiencing destructive events leading to loss of life and material destruction for centuries, the past hundred years have been marked by an especially heightened global interest in disasters. This development can be attributed to the rising impact of disasters on communities throughout the twentieth century and the consequent increase in awareness among the general public. Today, international and local agencies, scientists, politicians, and other actors including nongovernmental organizations across the world are working toward untangling and tackling the various chains of causality surrounding disasters. Numerous research and practitioners’ initiatives are taking place to inform and improve preparedness and response mechanisms. Recently, it has been acknowledged that more needs to be learned about the social and cultural aspects of disasters in order for these efforts to be successful (IFRC 2014).

scholarly journals Private Lives, Public Histories: The Diary in Twentieth-Century Britain

2015 ◽  
Vol 54 (1) ◽  
pp. 138-162 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joe Moran
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Research ◽  
Recent Past ◽  
Historical Evidence ◽  
Private Lives ◽  
The Social ◽  
Private Citizens ◽  
Mass Circulation ◽  
Public Archives ◽  
Insight Into

AbstractThis article examines the growth of interest in diary keeping in twentieth-century Britain. It explores how diary keeping by private citizens was encouraged in the first part of the century by mass-circulation newspapers, diary manufacturers, diary anthologists like Arthur Ponsonby, and the social research organization Mass Observation in response to changing notions of the self, privacy, and daily life. It discusses the ways in which, in the context of a growing interest in public archives, these private diaries have more recently been imagined as compelling forms of historical evidence, as well as some of the problems of organization and interpretation that these kinds of texts present. I argue that the inherently opaque and incomplete nature of private diaries means that they can add nuance to our understanding of the recent past and offer insight into the randomness and singularity of everyday experience as it is being lived.

Yahweh and His Clio: Critical Theory and the Historical Criticism of the Hebrew Bible

2006 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 149-168 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. D. Miller
Keyword(s):  
Critical Theory ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Hebrew Bible ◽  
Social World ◽  
Historical Criticism ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Social ◽  
Ancient Israel ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Impact

Discussion about the reconstruction of the history of ancient Israel seldom interacts with theoretical literature on the nature of history. Modern attempts to write Israel’s history, however, have been shaped by their theoretical underpinnings for the past two centuries. This essay explores the epistemological underpinnings of the historical criticism of the Hebrew Bible, outlines trends in historiographical theory, and assesses the impact newer theories of intellectual cultural history can have on studies of the history of the social world of ancient Israel.

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