Parnicki a Rosja. Rekonesans

The article considers issue of the connections between Teodor Parnicki, the Polish author of historical novels, and Russia. His attitude has its origins in biographical experiences. Knowledge of Russian culture is evident especially in the early work of Parnicki, and above all – in literary criticism of the interwar period. Careful reading shows that the sketches and reviews are a conservative critical project, the subject of which is Soviet social and cultural policy and communism in general. This article also complements the current state of research (who did not address this issue), while being a contribution to further research.

High-fidelity consumption and the claustropolitan structure of feeling

This paper invokes Redhead’s concept of claustropolitanism to critically explore the affective reality for consumers in today’s digital age. In the context of surveillance capitalism, we argue that consumer subjectivity revolves around the experience of fidelity rather than agency. Instead of experiencing genuine autonomy in their digital lives, consumers are confronted with a sense of confinement that reflects their tacit conformity to the behavioural predictions of surveillant market actors. By exploring how that confinement is lived and felt, we theorise the collective affects that constitute a claustropolitan structure of feeling: incompletion, saturation and alienation. These affective contours trace an oppressive atmosphere that infuses consumers’ lives as they attempt to seek fulfilment through digital market-located behaviours that are largely anticipated and coordinated by surveillant actors. Rather than motivate resistance, these affects ironically work to perpetuate consumers’ commitment to the digital world and their ongoing participation in the surveillant marketplace. Our theorisation continues the critical project of re-assessing the consumer subject by showing how subjectivity is produced at the point of intersection between ideological imperatives and affective consequences.

Kantian Hesitations around the Proper Philosophical Method

According to leading Kant scholars, in mid-1760s Kant realizes that his program for the reform of metaphysics cannot be developed by the method of conceptual analysis which he had previously considered to be more adequate than the synthetic method of the Wolffians that imitates the mathematical one. In this paper, I put into question the claim of a pre-Critical project of ‘analytical metaphysics’ by trying to show that even for the ‘pre-Critical’ Kant the proper method of metaphysics is genuinely synthetic, but the synthetic construction in question should have been prepared by a Critical and subsequent exhaustive analysis of key material-instrumental concepts of the peculiar philosophical science under question.

Deleuze’s reading of the Critique of Pure Reason

The aim of this paper is to provide an analysis of Gilles Deleuze’s interpretation of the Critique of Pure Reason such as it appears in his 1963 monographic work La Philosophie critique de Kant. We will show that the originality of Deleuze’s reading lies in reading the critical project in retrospect, taking the sensus communis problem from the Critique of the Power of Judgment and applying it to the first Critique. In so doing, he points out the survival of a pre-established harmony, now interiorized, both between heterogeneous faculties and between the matter of phenomena and the Ideas of reason. This implies a reinterpretation of the critical project that has passed unnoticed within Kantian studies and that places the Third Critique as the ground of the previous ones, unveiling common sense as a condition of possibility of knowledge.

On decolonial revisions of modern social theory

This review essay discusses decolonial and revisionist approaches to the sociological canon, centring on a major new work, Colonialism and Modern Social Theory by Gurminder Bhambra and John Holmwood (2021). The challenge to ‘classical’ social theory and the demand to reconstitute the theory curriculum come in the context of increased visibility for wider decolonial agendas, linked to ‘fallist’ protests in South Africa, Black Lives Matter and allied antiracist organizing, and calls to decolonize public and civic spaces and institutions such as universities, effect museum restitution, and colonial reparations. The review identifies continuities and complementarities with Connell’s critique of the sociological canon, though Colonialism and Modern Social Theory takes a different tack from Connell’s Southern Theory (2009). Bhambra and Holmwood’s opening of sociology’s canon converges with Connell’s recent work to align a critical project of global and decolonial public sociology with a pragmatic programme for doing academic work differently.

Embodying Difference: Introducing ‘Contact Movement’ as an Ethnographic Method

This contribution to the special issue advances an ethnographic method which directs the critical project of re-imagining diversity towards studies of how difference emerges in fieldwork encounters. Drawing on my experiences of researching without eyesight, I urge students and teachers of anthropology to acknowledge the value of embodied research methods for examining social and corporeal differences in researcher-participant relationships. Firstly, I call attention to moments when embodied fieldwork may be resisted and how these are expressed as naturalised differences between researchers and participants. To deconstruct such naturalisations, I devise contact movement as a method which allows researchers to embody how these ethnographic tensions, or indeed differences, are negotiated between researchers and their participants. Ultimately, contact movement eagerly re-imagines diversity through a methodological rethink that permits ethnographers to embody and explore the collaborative production of difference in their intersubjective relationships, within the field and beyond.

Ideological manoeuvres in and around Pink Dot

This commentary comprises two parts. In the first part, different ways ‘ideological manoeuvres’ performed in and around Pink Dot discourses in Singapore and Hong Kong, as evinced in this special issue, are highlighted. ‘Ideological manoeuvres’ refer to the ideological actions and skilful management undertaken by social actors, explicitly or implicitly, to bring about or secure a tactical end in support of, or in opposition to, the Pink Dot LGBT social movement. In the second part, how the ideological manoeuvres are on-goingly shaped by, and shape, the geopolitics of gender/sexuality in Singapore and Hong Kong are discussed. In this regard, two areas are highlighted: the politics of Pink Dot’s expressed apoliticism; and the transnational purchase of Pink Dot’s mode of political organising. Both of these areas ‘speak to’ a critical project on the decolonisation of gender/sexual knowledge-making and practice in these two Asian contexts.

Beyond the entrepreneur society: Foucault, neoliberalism and the critical attitude

Michel Foucault’s The Birth of Biopolitics is generally acknowledged as a pioneering study of neoliberalism, presenting it not merely as an economic theory but also as a mode of government. There is much debate, however, on Foucault’s intentions in analysing neoliberalism and the place of the genealogy in his broader critical project. The Birth of Biopolitics itself lacks both an explicit judgement of neoliberalism and an explicit ethical program. In this article, I maintain that Foucault’s genealogical work on neoliberalism is complementary to his notions of agency. From this perspective, Foucault’s genealogy is not a judgement of neoliberalism in terms of right or wrong but rather serves as a breeding ground for ethical conduct. The notion of the critical attitude in particular shows that Foucault’s genealogical work stands in the service of the subject’s autonomy. However, Foucault is reluctant to fill in his ethical program too much because it should gain substance only in local struggles and through the subject’s own considerations.