Toward a Realism of the World-System: John Lanchester’s Capital and the Global City

This essay explores how John Lanchester’s Capital adapts classical realism to represent the contemporary global city; it pays particular attention to how London’s position in the world-system disrupts Lukácsian totality. Because the novel attends to the complexity and extensiveness of the world-system, it depicts the city not as a representative totality but as embedded in the global circuits of capital, shaped by the influences of inward migration and global finance. In this the novel has affinities with many fictions of the global periphery, for instance portraying the city as at once socially fragmented and structurally connected. Furthermore, the novel departs from classical realism in its closure; though the 2008 financial crisis is omitted from the novel, it overshadows the entire plot, and its absence emphasizes the lack of finality in the story of this phase of capitalism itself. In demonstrating the temporal and spatial unknowability of contemporary capital, Lanchester’s novel both affirms the capacity of realism to trace deep systemic connections and reveals the fragility of its construction of a social totality, positing a realism attendant to its own perspectival limits within the world-system.

A Literary Piece as a Sociological Work: The Concept of Modernity in Karel Čapek’s "War With the Newts"

A literary Piece as a Sociological Work: The Concept of Modernity in Karel Čapek’s War With the NewtsIn this text, I interpret Karel Čapek’s novel War With the Newts (1936) as a sociological work and analyze the concept of the modern age that it presents. First, I show in what sense Čapek’s work was sociological. Following Theodor Adorno, I suggest that the difference between literature and sociology is not of a fundamental but of a historical and analytical nature, and that what defines sociology is not method, empiricism, or explicitly defined concepts, but the insightful notion of social totality. In Čapek, I analyze a social totality that I find in his concept of the modern age. Such an analysis provides insight into the self-destructive power of modern society. I suggest that Čapek’s portrayal of modernity still applies today and that we can recognize the same patterns he presented in the world around us. Utwór literacki jako dzieło socjologiczne. Koncepcja nowoczesności w Inwazji jaszczurów Karela ČapkaW artykule analizuję powieść Karela Čapka Inwazja jaszczurów (1936) jako pracę socjologiczną, skupiając się na zaprezentowanej w niej koncepcji nowoczesności. W pierwszej części tekstu pokazuję, w jakim sensie można uznać pracę Čapka za socjologiczną. Podążając śladami Theodora W. Adorna, uważam, że różnica między literaturą a socjologią nie jest fundamentalna, a jedynie historyczna i analityczna, oraz że wyróżnikiem socjologii nie są metoda, empiryzm czy jednoznacznie zdefiniowane koncepcje, lecz dające głęboki wgląd pojęcie całości społecznej. W drugiej części tekstu analizuję zidentyfikowane przeze mnie u Čapka pojęcie całości społecznej, jakie stanowi jego koncepcja nowoczesności. Analiza ta pozwala uzyskać wgląd w autodestrukcyjną moc nowoczesnego społeczeństwa. Staram się dowieść, że przedstawiona przez tego autora wizja nowoczesności jest wciąż aktualna, a opisane przez niego wzory możemy zaobserwować w otaczającym nas świecie.

Microarchaeology, Materiality and Social Practice

In this paper we propose an operative social theory that eliminates the need for a pre-defined regional context or spatio-temporal social entities like social system, culture, society or ethnic group. The archaeological object in a microarchaeological approach is not a closed and homogeneous social totality, but rather the structurating practices, the regulative actions operating in a field ofhumans and things. In order to address these issues more systematically, we discuss social action, materialities and the constitution of archaeological evidence. Sartre's concept of serial action implies that materialities and social agency are integrated elements in the structuration process. We suggest that such patterns of action can be partially retrieved from the fragmented material evidence studied by the archaeologist.

Lukács and Dostoevsky: Reading Dostoevsky as a Milestone on the Road to Bolshevism

The article is devoted to the influence of the interpretation of the works of the great Russian writer F.M. Dostoevsky on early Lukacs in the pre-revolution­ary years. Reading Dostoevsky’s works played an important role in his transition to the position of Bolshevism. The early Lukacs emphasized that Dostoevsky in­structed his atheist heroes to express their real position. Through the prism of these heroes, he interpreted the problem of revolutionary terrorism, drawing on the works of B. Savinkov. The early Lukacs also saw the greatness of Dosto­evsky in the fact that he was the first in world literature to turn to the “reality of the soul”, began to describe it, while ordinary external life (social ties, social sta­tus, etc.), although generated by the soul, is secondary and insignificant. These ideas of the early Lukacs are a kind of precursor to his future Marxist ideas of reification and alienation. The early Lukacs vehemently denies inauthentic ordi­nary life, but this denial is still metaphysically existential. After his “leap” into a new faith, Lukacs interprets what he previously understood as “inauthentic life” through the prism of early Marx, dialectically and socially-historically, through the categories of “reification”, the socialist revolution, and the prole­tariat as a privileged subject-object of world history. For Lukacs, the Marxist, the true reality will no longer be the individual soul, but the social totality and prac­tice. However, it is characteristic that Lukacs’ path to unconditional acceptance of the philosophy of Marxism and Bolshevism lay, among other things, through his fascination with the work of Dostoevsky

Geopolitical Aesthetics

The third, most abstract allegorical level is that of the acousmatic gaze, which Jameson himself does not address, but which is implicit in his theoretical re-evaluation of the conspiracy motif. In analyzing the paranoia films of New Hollywood, I am interested in the theoretical mediation of the concepts of suture and allegory. I show that the acousmatics of these films correspond with the intransparency of social totality. The films diagnose the negativity of totality in order to make it graspable again for the subject’s capacity of imagination. In my discussion of Miami Vice, I try to sketch out how such an aesthetic of cognitive mapping is also effective under the new geopolitical conditions of globalization. In the final sequence of the film, for example, the almost melancholic recourse to the suture of shot and reverse-shot coincides with the allegorical utopia of an unrepresentable Cuba. In this sense, in Jameson’s aesthetics of the politically unconscious, the mapping of totality is always interwoven with a utopian impulse.

The Political Uncanny, or the Return of Domination: The Shining

My concluding interpretation of Kubrick’s The Shining is once again a synthetic reading of the whole work using the tools of film analysis. In a Lacanian/Žižekian extension of Jameson’s reading of the film, I will demonstrate how Kubrick, in the guise of a popular genre film, creates a spectral analysis of the postmodern, late capitalist totality. In a second step I seek to go beyond Jameson in order to prove that The Shining, in its natural-history totalization of capitalism, is even more total than Jameson ascribes to the film in his class-history reading. Like perhaps no other film, The Shining opens itself up to the wounds of the social totality, but at the same time, in its hermetic formal perfection, the film creates the counter-measure of a purely aesthetic totality, which may itself be utopian.

Introduction

In the second part of this book, the political aesthetics of negativity is worked through from a different perspective. In Fredric Jameson’s writings on film, which are based on an idiosyncratic synthesis of Hegelian Marxism and psychoanalysis, the absent cause of the Lacanian real is that of a social totality which has become inaccessible to the subject under the conditions of late capitalism. For Jameson, the problem of a political film aesthetic refers primarily to an epistemological problem of aesthetically sensualizing the incommensurability between subject and totality.

Hegemony, Crisis and Bonapartism in Italy, Spain and France

The 2008 crisis and economic transformations (globalisation and financialisation) fuelled significant political phenomena, such as a deep distrust of politics, electoral volatility and the decline of bipolarity and/or bipartisanship in the face of growing outsider party affirmation. In this context, the dialectical model of the Gramscian ‘social totality’ provides an analytical tool capable of analysing those ‘transition’ phases characterised by a fracturing ‘dominant historical bloc’, in itself a precursor to an organic crisis of traditional political parties’ separation of social classes.

Lukács’ antinomic ‘standpoint of the proletariat’: From philosophical to socio-historical determination

In History and Class Consciousness’ central essay ‘Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat’, Lukács resolved the antinomies of bourgeois philosophy in the revolutionary ‘standpoint of the proletariat’. Lukács’ strategy in deriving this proletarian standpoint, however, transposed the logical necessity appropriate to philosophical determinations into possibilities for revolutionary praxis imbedded in socio-historical contexts. Further, since the standpoint is determined as the necessary solution to bourgeois antinomies, it must be conceived singularly, rather than through its manifest diversity. As the key to mediating the social totality beyond antinomies, the ‘standpoint of the proletariat’ is therefore merely reflectively posited and one-sidedly determined. While many have developed logical, social-analytic, and political problems associated with determining the proletariat by way of its imputed or party-determined rather than empirical consciousness, few point to the very concept ‘standpoint of the proletariat’ as the source for these problems due to the fact that it is an abstractly derived solution to a philosophically posed problem. Socio-historical determination working with the modality of possibility can resolve Lukács’ antinomic determination of the standpoint of the proletariat.