Modernism, Inflation and the Gold Standard in T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound

The great inflation of the 1920s had a dramatic effect on Anglophone literary modernism. Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot and Ernest Hemingway all recognized that financial signs had come unmoored from any objective reference, and their work explores the literary implications of representation's newly autonomous, performative power. Pound blamed the economic and cultural crisis on ‘usury.’ Following Aristotle, he conceived of usury as the unnatural reproduction of autonomous representation, and thus as the antithesis of natural sexual and semiotic fertility. He particularly deplored the historical role played by Samuel Loyd, the Victorian head of Lloyds Bank, who had cunningly manipulated the gold standard in order to give control of the economy to ‘usurers.’ In his financial journalism for Lloyds Bank Monthly, Eliot used the gold standard as an economic logos in order to facilitate usury. Pound saw that Eliot's theory of the ‘objective correlative’ was incompatible with the referential model of representation assumed by the gold standard.

The performative power of frictions and new possibilities: Studying power, performativity and process with Follett’s pragmatism.

This article seeks to open up new possibilities for process organization studies to reimagine power and performativity by exploring the potential of Mary Parker Follett’s pragmatism as process philosophy. I revisit her body of work to show how she translated her process ontology into theoretical resources and practical insights that allow for new ways of understanding power and performativity together and explore them as mutually constituting processes of organizing. In particular, I mobilize Follett’s view of conflicts as emerging differences in the world and frictions as constructive conflicts with the potential to generate something new in order to introduce and conceptualize ‘performative power’, that is, the power emerging from relating and integrating differences in organizational situations that are experienced as frictions by people involved. Drawing on my ethnographic study of an entrepreneurship accelerator – a training programme for innovators and start-up projects – I discuss and illustrate empirically how performative power is generated from frictions that arise in ordinary lived experiences. This conceptualization of performative power is an attempt to develop a processual and performative understanding of power, and a useful lens to conduct process research. Making a connection between performative power and the experience of frictions provides a new way to see, talk and study processually power in contemporary organizations.

From “pretty to pretty powerful”: The communicatively constituted power of facial beauty’s performativity

The face is a significant locus of power upon which judgements concerning a person’s status, worth and attractiveness are made. This study contributes to knowledge of facial norms’ shifting performative power in daily organizing, theorizing facial beauty as a communicatively constituted authoritative text. We achieve this through blending Butlerian and communication as constitutive of organization (CCO) theorizing. This allows us to enrich understandings of power and performativity’s necessarily entangled and co-constitutive unfolding, as we trace how a normative understanding of facial beauty becomes more and/or less performatively powerful through embodied-textual processes. Our theorizing is generated from an ethnography of a UK cosmetics firm and demonstrates how facial beauty functions as a (figurative) authoritative text that corporealizes, subjectivizes, and is resisted by makeup artists within a confluence of (concrete) text and conversation. We show how through communicative, citational and embodied processes of corporealization, regulation and subjection, everyday performances like makeup applications become performatively powerful on the ground level of interaction. Further, returning authoritative texts to their original figurative formulation uncovers something of how their transformative power shapes organizing’s ongoing accomplishment.

Reconsidering Early Detection in Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) by Local Frontline Professionals

In recent years, the fight against terrorism and political violence has focused more on anticipating the threats that they pose. Therefore, early detection of ideas by local professionals has become an important part of the preventive approach in countering radicalization. Frontline workers who operate in the arteries of society are encouraged to identify processes towards violent behavior at an early stage. To date, however, little is known about how these professionals take on this screening task at their own discretion. Research from the Netherlands suggests that subjective assessment appears to exist. This is due to the absence of a clear norm for preliminary judgments. However, such an approach affects prejudice or administrative arbitrariness, which may cause side effects due to unjustified profiling. The publications about the Dutch case are inspired by the concept of “performativity”, (de Graaf, B., & de Graaff, B. G. J. (2010). Bringing politics back in: The introduction of the ‘performative power’ of counterterrorism. Critical Studies on Terrorism, 3(2), pp. 261–275.) which points to a distinct relationship between the performative power of counterterrorism instruments and the effectiveness of the local approach. Performativity contends that the overall effect of the policy in question is not necessarily determined by the policy measures and their intended results, as such, but more by the way in which they are presented and perceived. This means that, in order to create an equitable approach, governments, whether local or national, should focus more on the actual practice performed by frontline practitioners. The focus on practices is part of a larger project, entitled ‘Gatekeepers of Justice’ (See: https://www.internationalhu.com/research/access-to-justice), by the Research Group Access2Justice (Research Centre of Social Innovation at Utrecht University of Applied Science), led by professor Quirine Eijkman, Deputy President of the Netherlands Institute for Human Rights.

Fidélité créatrice als performative Größe und die Beziehung zwischen Hermeneutik und Kreativität in der Translation

Performance plays a decisive role in both everyday and artistic communication because it is always important to achieve effects. The question of the nature of this effect touches on central aspects of knowledge in general, i. e. whether it is about the realisation of a personal view of reality or whether reality itself realises its effect with the help of the transmitter. The classical concept of mimesis (i. e. the effort to imitate nature) strikes a balance between the subjective and the objective side of truthfinding. In translation studies, too, the concept of performance plays a central role, since every translation is in principle an assignment that is given specifically, with certain objectives. From a translatological point of view, one term of modern philosophy, or more precisely a term coined by Gabriel Marcel, proves to be particularly fruitful for this: fidélité créatrice. Faithfulness to the original is not strict reproduction, but rather the constant updating of essential elements in the service of a goal to be achieved. In this article, the translational performance thus understood will be presented in three variations and illustrated by means of examples. Firstly, it will be a matter of recognizing the performance of the original and trying to ‘effect’ it anew. Secondly, the performance underlying the multiple translation, which corresponds to new and changed intentions, will be examined. Thirdly, translation is to be seen as the performance of a translator as an individual who ‘puts his or her own stamp’ on it. It will be recognized that by orienting oneself towards the concepts of mimesis and fidélité créatrice, fidelity to the original in terms of an active search for deeper layers of its meaning is not only of hermeneutical significance, but also unfolds a relevant performative power.

The Performative Power of Queer Assembly

This paper addresses some relations between the spatial politics of queer assemblies in spaces of protest and the constitution of collective political subjects. It does so by exploring the spatial politics of queer activism within the global Occupy movements, in the light of Judith Butler’s work on the performative power of assembly and the ambivalences of the Foucauldian concept of heterotopia. Specific challenges faced by queer activists in various encampments will be addressed in order to expose some tensions between the constitutive exclusions inherent to the constitution of spaces of protest and the processes of coalition building needed to effectively overcome those very constitutive exclusions.

The Performative Power of Vocality, Virginie Magnat (2019)

Review of: The Performative Power of Vocality, Virginie Magnat (2019) London and New York: Routledge, 240 pp., ISBN 978-0-42934-033-8, e-book, £37.79