On the assumption of self-reflective subjectivity

Contemporary social theory has consistently emphasized habitual action, rule-following, and role-performing as key aspects of social life, yet the challenge remains of combining these aspects with the omnipresent phenomenon of self-reflective conduct. This article attempts to tackle this challenge by proposing useful distinctions that can facilitate further interdisciplinary research on self-reflection. To this end, I argue that we need a more sophisticated set of distinctions and categories in our understanding of habitual action. The analysis casts light on the idea that our contemporary social theories of self-reflection are not consistent with everyday notions of agential knowledgeability and accountability, and this conclusion indicates the need to reconceptualize discourse and subjectivity in non-eliminative terms. Ultimately, the assumption of self-reflective subjectivity turns out to be a theoretical necessity for the conceptualization of discursive participation and democratic choice.

Towards Neuroecosociality: Mental Health in Adversity

Social theory has much to gain from taking up the challenges of conceptualizing ‘mental health’. Such an approach to the stunting of human mental life in conditions of adversity requires us to open up the black box of ‘environment’, and to develop a vitalist biosocial science, informed by and in conversation with the life sciences and the neurosciences. In this paper we draw on both classical and contemporary social theory to begin this task. We explore human inhabitation – how humans inhabit their ‘ecological niches’ – and examine a number of conceptual developments that ‘deconstruct’ the binary distinction between organism and environment. We argue that we must understand the neurological, ecological and social pathways and mechanisms that shape human (mental) life if we are to address the central concerns of our discipline with inequity and injustice as these are inscribed into the bodies and souls of human beings.

DECOLONIZING THE REPRESENTATIONS ABOUT COLONIZATION: GEOGRAPHIC REFLECTIONS

Most representations about the process of spatial expansion of capitalism over the spatial cuts that today constitute what we know as Brazil and Latin America, through the advance of colonization, perpetuates what some authors have been calling ideology of demographic voids, which would be the tendency to represent these spaces before their appropriation and incorporation into the capitalist world system as desert areas, without human beings, thus concealing the violence inherent in it. Despite the advances in Contemporary Social Theory, this type of timespace representation has still been reproduced and perpetuated in many historiographic and academic works from different areas of knowledge. The following article presents reflections on this phenomenon, developed with fulcrum in studies on the spatial profile that today constitutes the State of Espírito Santo, in order to understand the theoretical vices that corroborate the perpetuation of this type of representation.

Simmel’s (non-human) humanism: On Simmel’s ‘ethics of endings and futures’

Given the recent non-human turn in sociology and the social sciences, the popularity of theories of entanglement, and contemporary concern with the concept of the anthropocene, it is easy to forget that classical sociology was always-already aware of the relationship between humanity and non-humanity. Although Daniel Chernilo focuses upon the debate between Sartre and Heidegger in his recent Debating Humanity, and contrasts Sartre’s Humanism with Heidegger’s Anti-Humanism to frame his exploration of the limits of the human in contemporary social theory, we could easily locate the same concern with the human and its relationship to the nonhuman in Marx, Tarde, and centrally for the purposes of this article, the work of Georg Simmel. Expanding upon this insight concerning the relevance of Simmel’s work for understanding our ‘entangled present’, the purpose of this article is to explore Simmel’s work and recent interpretations of his sociology that seek to project Simmelian thought into the future in significantly different ways. To this end, the article critically engages with Pyyhtinen’s recent reading of Simmel’s work that focuses upon his legacy with a view of exploring his future through consideration of (1) Fitzi’s exploration of Simmel’s ethics of the individual, (2) Kemple’s turn to Simmel’s religiosity, and finally (3) Beer’s reading of the late Simmel, who, I suggest might inform the emergence of a kind of non-human humanism capable of thinking beyond the mortal limits of the anthropocene that paradoxically imagines its own post-human immortality.

Introduction: The Decline of the Enlightenment

This chapter focuses on the disappearance of political philosophy in recent years and the prevalence of theories that arose in opposition to the Enlightenment. It talks about Romanticism as the earliest and most successful antagonist of the Enlightenment, which has numerous successors in existentialism and in the various philosophies of the absurd. It also analyzes the revival of social thought, gradual decay of the radical aspirations of liberalism, and evaporation of socialist thought that have left the Enlightenment without intellectual heirs. The chapter describes Enlightenment as the historical and intellectual starting point of contemporary social theory. It emphasizes how the Enlightenment is still the intellectual focus for many who no longer share its beliefs, and who develop their own viewpoint in refuting the attitudes of a past era.

Free Money in a Mousetrap of Surveillance Capitalism: Basic Income and Social Theory

The article concerns the social theory of an unconditional basic income (a regular payment to each person regardless of their level of need or employment). The article points out that, during the last three years in Russia, the idea of a basic income has been actively discussed. This applies mainly to economists, whereas the author puts the question of a basic income in the context of Western social theory. In a situation of ever-accelerating changes that affect society (from technologicalization and automation to the reduction of social time), the world faces many global challenges. A basic income is one of them. The article highlights the reasons for the actualization of the topic of a universal basic income in contemporary social theory of the last ten years. These include automation, the transformation of the economy leading to changes in the types of employment, experiments on the implementation of a basic income in some countries, and most importantly, the discussion of “bullshitization”, which has happened to many jobs in the framework of contemporary financial capitalism (David Graeber). It reveals the understanding of a basic income by its key proponents and theorists (Srnicek, Williams, Van Parijs, Vanderborght, Ford, Graeber, Standing, and others), as well as the fact that freedom is often called as the main goal of a basic income implementation. The paper demonstrates that, in fact, we are mostly talking about the imperative of freedom, which is not always properly clarified. However, it does not matter how freedom is understood in the works of basic income theorists since it is unlikely to be realized in modern socio-economic conditions, and because current capitalism has mutated so much that it now uses the very fabric of human experience rather than labor as its raw material. In this context, talks about automation is more of a thought experiment, and therefore the discussion should be shifted to another perspective. Despite the fact that, according to the author’s case, a basic income is not entirely impossible in practice (and even perhaps not being desirable), it provides fruitful material for the development of contemporary social theory.