{"title":"Online Conspiracy Theories, Digital Platforms and Secondary Orality: Toward a Sociology of Online Monsters","authors":"T. Venturini","doi":"10.1177/02632764211070962","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/02632764211070962","url":null,"abstract":"Reviving the somewhat forgotten notion of ‘secondary orality’, this paper conceptualizes online conspiracism as a creative, if monstrous, response to the attention economy of social media. Combining classic literature on oral cultures and current research on online subcultures, this paper takes conspiratorial folklore seriously and develops a program of research into its features and into its surprising adaptation to the attention regime of digital media.","PeriodicalId":48276,"journal":{"name":"Theory Culture & Society","volume":"11 1","pages":"61 - 80"},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2022-03-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76458738","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Rethinking Human-Smartphone Interaction with Deleuze, Guattari, and Polanyi","authors":"Nicholas Fazio","doi":"10.1177/02632764221074182","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/02632764221074182","url":null,"abstract":"An inbuilt theoretical deficiency of any cybernetic or phenomenological accounts of human-smartphone interaction is that their inherited frameworks suffer from lopsided explanatory proficiencies. Neither can explicate one ‘side’ of the interaction without inappropriately foisting those logics onto its dyadic counterpart. In this paper, both Michael Polanyi’s bio-philosophy and a Deleuzo-Guattarian philosophy of brain seek to remedy this conceptual deficit by positing a conceptual toolkit that incorporates pertinent cybernetic and phenomenological revelations while abjuring their dogmatizing propensities. This conjoined reading of Polanyi with Deleuze and Guattari asserts that temporary, bounded structures of interference between mind and machine – rooted in asymmetry, inertia, and labile planes of cognition – are the grounding dimension of human-smartphone interaction, which is itself taken as emblematic of our wider relations to smart technologies.","PeriodicalId":48276,"journal":{"name":"Theory Culture & Society","volume":"58 1","pages":"105 - 120"},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2022-02-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87644745","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Guy Debord, an Untimely Aristocrat","authors":"E. Russell","doi":"10.1177/02632764211069298","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/02632764211069298","url":null,"abstract":"This essay excavates the pre-capitalist influences of the thought of Guy Debord, French postwar critical theorist and founding member of the Situationist International. Tracing a lineage of what can be described as Debord’s aristocratic sensibility, we discover not simply an aesthetic approach to navigating social life, or guidelines for outmanoeuvring an adversary, but also contempt for honest labour, monetary transactions in cultural affairs, and conventional political gestures. Together these themes remain part of a legacy of an aristocratic past, one that, as will be examined here, informed Debord’s acrimony towards his own mid-20th-century moment. The following discussion will advance a genealogy of Debord’s thinking with these themes from late antiquity to the Italian Renaissance, and finally with an extended examination of the baroque, a concept that helps advance Debord’s diagnostic concept of the society of the spectacle.","PeriodicalId":48276,"journal":{"name":"Theory Culture & Society","volume":"5 1","pages":"103 - 125"},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2022-02-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80075037","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Precarious Multitude of Bacurau","authors":"Francesco Sticchi","doi":"10.1177/02632764211070780","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/02632764211070780","url":null,"abstract":"This article aims to investigate the political and conceptual power of the successful and highly praised film Bacurau (Juliano Dornelles and Kleber Mendonça Filho, 2019) by inserting it within general trends of contemporary visual culture surrounding the issue of cinematic precarity. The discussion will find its analytical coordinates around the notions of chronotope and dialogism. These tools are notoriously attributed to Mikhail Bakhtin and are intended to investigate regular patterns in aesthetic experiences and to evaluate the differential and subversive potential to be attributed to every case study. The grounding assumption of the following analysis is to understand cinematic experience as an ecological encounter and an affective and conceptual interaction in which viewers find the opportunity to explore and experience complex ethical systems: a productive interrelation that allows us also to connect the discussion with reflections upon general dynamics of neoliberal governance and with trajectories of resistance and revolt against it.","PeriodicalId":48276,"journal":{"name":"Theory Culture & Society","volume":"14 1","pages":"201 - 215"},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2022-02-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74999419","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Baudrillard and Heidegger: Between Two Deaths","authors":"Vanessa Anne-Cecile Freerks","doi":"10.1177/02632764211070279","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/02632764211070279","url":null,"abstract":"In this article, I compare the ways in which Baudrillard and Heidegger seek to bring attention to the importance of death for our personal existential situation which has now become repressed in conceptions of existence and society. Heidegger critiques public conceptions of death that serve to cover up its importance. Less well known is that, somewhat in parallel fashion, Baudrillard charts a ‘genealogy’ of the ‘extradition’ of the dead from the centre of the social and he claims that we live currently in a death denying society. This reduces the meaning of our own impending deaths. However, unlike Heidegger, Baudrillard’s ‘genealogical’ critique of the exclusion of death in modern society is not a one-way dismissal because he proposes an alternative social role for death in the form of ‘primitive symbolic exchange’.","PeriodicalId":48276,"journal":{"name":"Theory Culture & Society","volume":"91 1","pages":"87 - 104"},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2022-02-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89780462","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Re-thinking the Liquid Core of Capitalism with Hyman Minsky","authors":"M. Konings, L. Adkins","doi":"10.1177/02632764211070776","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/02632764211070776","url":null,"abstract":"While Minsky’s work is often identified with the critique of financial speculation, this paper argues that there is a different side to his work. We argue that Minsky can be read as offering a post-foundational perspective on political economy that recognizes the speculative dimension of all economic activity. This post-foundational reading allows for an understanding of neoliberal policymaking in terms of the provision of liquidity to too-big-to-fail constituencies. The article discusses how some segments of Western societies have been able to participate in the inflationary logic of this too-big-to-fail dynamic, whereas others are locked out and face increasingly tight liquidity constraints. This differential access to liquidity is an increasingly central aspect of the stratifying rationality of contemporary capitalism. By connecting Minsky’s insights into the temporal logic of capital to key issues in social theory, the article presents a new theorization of (il)liquid life that advances on extant accounts.","PeriodicalId":48276,"journal":{"name":"Theory Culture & Society","volume":"17 1","pages":"43 - 60"},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2022-02-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90086175","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Reflections on the Contemporary Public Sphere: An Interview with Judith Butler","authors":"M. Seeliger, Paula-Irene Villa Braslavsky","doi":"10.1177/02632764211066260","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/02632764211066260","url":null,"abstract":"In this conversation, Berkeley-based philosopher Judith Butler offers insights into her understanding of the public sphere and its current transformations as a core dimension of political subjectivity. Beginning with her own understanding of Habermas’ classic, the interview centers around its connection to other classical texts (e.g. of Hannah Arendt) and timely political debates.","PeriodicalId":48276,"journal":{"name":"Theory Culture & Society","volume":"140 1","pages":"67 - 74"},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2022-01-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86633449","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Coloniality, Epistemic Imbalance, and Africa’s Emigration Crisis","authors":"D. C. Ude","doi":"10.1177/02632764211054123","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/02632764211054123","url":null,"abstract":"The paper has two complementary objectives. First, it sustains an analysis of the concept of ‘coloniality’ that accounts for the epistemic imbalance in the modern world, demonstrating precisely how Africa is adversely affected, having been caught up in the throes of coloniality and its epistemic implications. Second – and complementarily – the paper attempts to bring this very concept of ‘coloniality’ into the discourse on Africa’s emigration crisis, arguing that Africa’s emigration crisis is traceable, inter alia, to the epistemic imbalance in the very structure of modernity. This imbalance results from the stifling of Africa’s epistemic resources under Western epistemic hegemony. Epistemic coloniality, of course interacting with some material factors, creates a sufficient condition for emigration. It is further theorized that the apparent lack of epistemic will on the part of Africans to mobilize some surviving epistemic resources to address some problems on their own is also a function of coloniality.","PeriodicalId":48276,"journal":{"name":"Theory Culture & Society","volume":"14 1","pages":"3 - 19"},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2021-12-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81110663","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Pierre Bourdieu: E-Special Issue Introduction","authors":"D. Robbins","doi":"10.1177/02632764211054746","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/02632764211054746","url":null,"abstract":"This e-special issue explores the reception of Bourdieu’s work in one journal, Theory, Culture & Society, which commenced at about the same time that Bourdieu was beginning to acquire an international reputation. It offers a case-study of the English representation of Bourdieu’s work through almost 40 years and focuses on the role of the journal in carrying Bourdieu’s work across cultural boundaries. It introduces the scope of that work but, primarily, it is designed to encourage reference to his texts in the contexts of their production and reception in order to invite new reflection and new evaluation in relation to contemporary problems.","PeriodicalId":48276,"journal":{"name":"Theory Culture & Society","volume":"24 1","pages":"325 - 353"},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2021-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75878849","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Introduction: Algorithmic Thought","authors":"M. Fazi","doi":"10.1177/02632764211054122","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/02632764211054122","url":null,"abstract":"This introduction to a special section on algorithmic thought provides a framework through which the articles in that collection can be contextualised and their individual contributions highlighted. Over the past decade, there has been a growing interest in artificial intelligence (AI). This special section reflects on this AI boom and its implications for studying what thinking is. Focusing on the algorithmic character of computing machines and the thinking that these machines might express, each of the special section’s essays considers different dimensions of algorithmic thought, engaging with a diverse set of epistemological questions and issues.","PeriodicalId":48276,"journal":{"name":"Theory Culture & Society","volume":"66 1","pages":"5 - 11"},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2021-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84074855","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}