Repensando la tecnopolítica desde los procesos electorales 2012 y 2018 en México

This article proposes the technopolitical concept as a way to reflect on media changes both in expressions of demand as in processes of social domination and the shaping of public opinion. Longitudinal digital ethnography was carried out on the 2012 and 2018 electoral processes in Mexico. It is concluded that technopolitics is an assembly process where actors interact, with differentiated political objectives, who seek to transform a given historicity or aspire to preserve existing political structures through mobilizations, actions in social media, media content production and other technological appropriations.

THE MARXIZATION OF POSTMODERNISM: EARLY WORKS OF JEAN BAUDRILLARD

This paper starts from the assumption that Jean Baudrillard represents one of the most significant post-poststructuralist/post-postmodernist thinkers. It deals with his early works: the characteristics of the system of objects structured into a “consumer society” and with the reformulation of Marxism on the basis of semiological theories of sign. The paper concludes that capitalism establishes social domination by imposing a system of sign values where the individual is assimilated by the consumer society and subordinated to its domination through acts of consumption. Ergo, consumption is an algorithm for the commodification of social homogenization and hegemony.

The Anglo-Saxon Elite

In all of the literature on Anglo-Saxon England, rarely has the question of social class been confronted head-on. This study draws upon recent research into topics such as religious practice, emotions, daily life, and intellectual culture to investigate how the aristocracy of Northumbria maintained social dominance over wider society. Moreover, this monograph suggests that the crisis that brought an end to Northumbria as an independent kingdom was the product of the social contradictions produced by the ruling class as social domination developed over time. The analysis is divided into three broad parts – production, circulation, and consumption – both as a nod to Marxist historiography and also to signal a commitment to a methodology that situates the subject within a global context.

Skin color and perceived discrimination: a comparative study between Brazilians and Mozambicans

Despite the numerous efforts to reduce prejudice and social discrimination as well as their repercussions, such phenomena are still part of everyday life and mark individual life stories. The experiences of the target and the agent of discrimination were differents. The present study addresses a gap in the literature of social psychology: through a relational analysis, it explores the perceptions of the target of discrimination without leaving aside the perspective of the agent. Using a computerized version of a self-report instrument, we aimed to assess the relation between the experience of racial discrimination and skin color and to what extent this relation is modulated by psychosocial and sociodemographic variables in two national contexts, Brazil and Mozambique. A total of 150 university students participated in the study, 89 from Brazil and 61 from Mozambique. The results show that in both countries the participants report more experiences of discrimination coming from White than from Black people, with a larger difference for the Brazilian sample population. The study also verified that the darker the person’s skin color, the higher their perception of having been discriminated against. In the Brazilian group, the accounts of discrimination coming both from White and Black people are associated with darker skin color. In the Mozambican group, diversely, participants with lighter and darker skin color perceived being the target of discrimination, inflicted both by White and Black people. Finally, we identified that perceived discrimination is predicted by skin color. The discussion focuses on the perspective of the targets of discrimination and highlights the role of skin color in the process of perceiving racial discrimination, especially regarding the psychosocial variables motivation to control prejudice and social domination.

Natural History and Aesthetic Truth in Aesthetic Theory

Theodor W. Adorno’s claim in Aesthetic Theory that artworks have a truth content, and that this truth content in turn depends on philosophical interpretation, is among the work’s most challenging and obscure claims. This article argues that “The Idea of Natural History,” Adorno’s lecture dating to 1932, offers important resources for interpreting the claim of art’s truth content. Reading the lecture’s core idea of transience, the article proposes that the form of philosophical interpretation Adorno develops there illuminates one way to clarify what Adorno means, in Aesthetic Theory, by the interpretation of art’s truth content. While far from definitive, this conclusion does support interpretations of art’s truth content that foreground art’s function as a critique of ideology, that is, of having a field of application that moves beyond the sphere of the aesthetic and toward the disclosure of conditions of social domination.

Axel Honneth: el conflicto social y los modos de la mirada. Apuntes para pensar el problema más allá del reconocimiento

In this paper we will address one of the forms that assume the social conflict, considering an everyday behavior: the look and the ways of representation that it produces. The beginning of our argumentation is marked by Axel Honneth’s theory of recognition. His contributions give a perspective that allow us to unite the analysis of socials struggles with the problem of the look. For this work we study how Honneth build an ethical approach about the look, from the ideas of recognition and inter-subjectivity. In that sense, practical behavior like social humiliation and social domination, materialized through the look, are read as the negative reverse of recognition. We seek to think the look inserted in the social conflict beyond recognition, because we defend the hypothesis that the notion of recognition, as proposed by Honneth, assumes normative assumptions that visualize conflict as oriented to the consolidation of a mediated understanding of one`s own personality and the self-affirmation of subject, as also assumes an evolutionary logic rationality. Once shown this, we will answer the question: how to understand/comprehend the problem of the look from a different perspective?

Epilogue

One of the most daunting problems that inner democracy has to face in the future is the increasing power of algorithms in our everyday lives. Institutional structures have emerged that confront us with largely invisible and even unknown power and truth regimes as the result of technological advances. Such basic democratic values as freedom and equality need to be rethought, as new technological advancements tend to introduce new inequalities and new forms of social domination. In this context, the question is posed in this chapter about the role that education can play in protecting and fostering inner democracy. Developing inner democracy in a digital age will require answers from both technological and the educational angles as mutually complementary resources.

The Meaning of Biopolitics in the Age of Numerical Revolution

Marshall McLuhan, in the 1960s, coined the well-known phrase “the world is a global village” at a time when the Internet did not exist, and new communication and media technologies were about to transform the world into a planetary village via interconnection. However, McLuhan may not have anticipated that accelerated technological advances would be made possible by communication without a “physical mediator-factor” and that the utilitarian and instrumental dimension of communication would give way to cultural and social domination and manipulation. In the numerical age, Foucault’s notion of “bio-politics” as a system of complete control and regulation of the body and life by means of science and technology is, at first glance, an outdated term, belonging to the past of modern, biopolitical and repressive societies. The numerical control is today based on a deep urge for individual and narcissistic exhibitionism in the new expository society.

‘Human Rights’, ‘Rule of Law’, and ‘Violence’

The principles and practices of ‘human rights’ have been dismissed as the discursive architecture of social domination from imperial to postcolonial regimes. Yet, criticisms of ‘human rights’ as colonial, minimalist, racist, bourgeois and otherwise subservient to capitalist or state interests have prompted ‘human rights’ advocates merely to improve its global ‘regime.’ ‘Human rights’ thus remains the hegemonic if anxiously defensive framework of justice activism, a kind of normative synonym for social engagement haunted by inadequate ethical justification. Given its internal desire for moral validation the ‘human rights’ project seeks to legitimize humanitarian organizations and campaigns by adopting the dualistic reason modelled on the rule-of-law/laws dialectic. But the progressive tension between the ‘rule of law’ (or lawfulness) and specific laws (or legislation) stages the discovery and refinement of particular societies’ commitments. The rule-of-law/laws dyad cannot be universalized to subsidize an ethically cogent ‘human rights regime’. The humanity:rights::rule/laws analogy fails by eliding the value-laden desires and justice claims discrete legal traditions mediate. The dis-analogy between universal rights and particular laws – rights express abstract ‘human’ traits but laws express concrete ‘cultural’ demands – suggests the violence of dualistic rationality more generally, manifest in the ‘humanitarian’ incapacity to endorse militant or non-secular resistance to occupation.