| 1. |
- Brandheim, Susanne, 1965-
(författare)
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The misrecognition mindset : A trap in the transformative responsibility of critical weight studies
- 2012
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Ingår i: Distinktion. - Florence, Kentucky : Routledge. - 1600-910X .- 2159-9149. ; 13:1, s. 93-108
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The ideal of being recognized feeds on developed recognition theories. In times of emerging self-reference, we have come to share what I call a ‘misrecognition mind-set’ making us translate every sense of deficiency as misrecognition. In response to a thin-celebrating culture that seemingly discriminates and stigmatizes the apparent failures of a prevailing slim-body-production, fat activists risk to embrace such a misrecognition mindset. I argue that a misrecognition mind-set is a double-binding trap that makes it impossible to transform society into a pattern of bodily-emancipated individuals. This paper is a first step towards a vision beyond recognition – a strong politics of social fragility built on anthropologist and cyberneticist Gregory Bateson’s ecology of mind. It is within our social fragility as parts of a whole, rather than in the intersubjective efforts to overcome it as parts of a dualism, that a true acknowledgment of one’s own circumstances hits the chord of transformative possibilities
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| 2. |
- Carleheden, Mikael, 1958-
(författare)
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The transformation of our conduct of life : One aspect of the three epochs of Western modernity
- 2006
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Ingår i: Distinktion. - Aarhus : Aarhus university press. - 1600-910X .- 2159-9149. ; :13, s. 55-75
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- In this article a concept of structural transformation is worked out and applied on the history of modernity. It involves a distinction between abstract modernity and epochs of realized modernities. The general theory of a structural transformation of modernity is applied on a special case; the transformation of the modern conduct of life in the West. The Weberian concept 'conduct of life' is today almost forgotten, but the author argues that it is a very useful conceptual tool for grasping crucial aspects of everyday life. These theoretical points of departure are then related to some classical American sociological investigations, but also to recent investigations. The result is a division of the history of conduct of life in Western modernity in three different epochs: the age of asceticism, the age of organization and the age of authenticity.
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| 3. |
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| 4. |
- Fareld, Victoria
(författare)
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The re- in recognition : Hegelian returns
- 2012
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Ingår i: Distinktion. - 1600-910X .- 2159-9149. ; 13:1, s. 125-138
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- By using ‘the return’ as a dialectical figure, the author discusses four contemporary appropriations of Hegelian dialectics – as restoration, recollection, repetition, and interpellation – in relation to the concept of recognition in contemporary political philosophy. They are seen in the light of social and political forces influencing European and North American intellectual debates from the events of 1989 to the aftermath of 9/11. By a critique of Charles Taylor's work, it is argued that Hegelian return conceived as restoration sets recognition as an act of self-appropriation through social mediation. Recognition becomes a means for self-unification through identity affirmation, a coming back to oneself as undistorted. The author subsequently sketches out two alternative appropriations of Hegelian dialectics in relation to questions of recognition: as recollection and repetition. The dialectical return understood as recollection turns recognition into an acknowledgement of intersubjective vulnerability. It sets the return to oneself as a peripeteian force, focusing on the unpredictable rebounding effects of one's own actions, a view advocated by Patchen Markell. Recognition becomes a movement toward self-expropriation if it turns on the necessary failures, indeed, on the impossibility of the return. The return as repetition becomes the place-holder for a unity that will never be. Jean-Luc Nancy is seen as an exponent of this perspective. The author ends by arguing for an understanding of the dialectical return as an interpellative force which turns our attention from recognition to recognizability, that is, from the relation between self and others to the social space and practices governing the space in which people appear as recognizable to each other, in line with the latest work of Judith Butler.
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| 5. |
- Fridolfsson, Charlotte
(författare)
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Politics, protest and the threatening outside : a discourse analysis of events at an EU summit
- 2004
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Ingår i: Distinktion. - 1600-910X .- 2159-9149. ; 5:1, s. 79-92
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Social movement protests at an EU summit in Gothenburg in 2001 are here analysed using discourse theory. This perspective envisages the constructed character of subjects, identities and discourses structuring the social. A hegemonic project, attempting to explain the antagonisms at the summit, was emphasised through signifying chains and the use of metaphor. The hegemonic effort of rescuing a unified and fully sutured social, instituted a constitutive outside—the deviant activist—explaining the interruptions in the idea of liberal democratic politics, here substantiated by the summit. Power seems crucial for what forms of protests are considered acceptable, and ultimately for what is viewed as valid political subjects or legitimate political demands.
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| 6. |
- Grobgeld, David, et al.
(författare)
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Resisting assimilation - ethnic boundary maintenance among Jews in Sweden
- 2021
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Ingår i: Distinktion. - 1600-910X .- 2159-9149. ; 22:2, s. 171-191
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This article evaluates Andreas Wimmer's theory of ethnic boundary making by applying it to the maintenance of Jewish ethnic identification in Sweden, as expressed in interviews with Swedish Jews. Wimmer proposes that ethnic conflict routinizes and entrenches perceptions of ethnic difference; we argue that the antisemitic persecutions of the twentieth century have entrenched the perception of the ethnic distinctiveness of Jews among Jews themselves. These persecutions also contribute to alienation from Swedish society, which does not share the same frames of understanding. These factors motivate the interviewees to maintain the ethnic boundary between Swedes and Jews and guard it against assimilation. We propose a nuancing of the debate between instrumentalist and primordialist conceptions of ethnic identity by arguing that while our interviewees express a taken-for-granted view of their ethnic identities, they advance ethnic discourse strategically in order to protect the Jewish community from losing its distinctness, especially through assimilation.
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| 7. |
- Jonsson, Stefan, 1961-
(författare)
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An Aesthetic Education of Social Theory : Some Comments on Robin Wagner-Pacifici’s What is an Event?
- 2018
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Ingår i: Distinktion. - : Taylor & Francis. - 1600-910X .- 2159-9149. ; 19:1, s. 98-105
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- An essay on Robin Wagner-Pacifici's 'What Is and Event?' (2017). The essay argues that Wagner-Pacifici's book offers a platform from which it again becomes possible to rethink the relationship between system and transformation, and that this is precisely what the human and social sciences need if they are to retain their ability to critically interpret the dense fabric of late capitalist society and culture – a society of the spectacle if there ever was one, a world from heel to head made up by events. The essay assess Wagner-Pacifici's analytical apparatus of political semiosis, and it shows that aesthetics, and literary and visual interpretation, to a large extent explains why Wagner-Pacifici can make a tremendous contribution to a theory of political emergence. Finally, the essay argues that aesthetic theory offers an intersection where social theory and the theory of history may begin a new conversation about human agency, social change and historical experie
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| 8. |
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| 9. |
- Näsström, Sofia
(författare)
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Democratic self-defense : Bringing the social model back in
- 2021
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Ingår i: Distinktion. - : Taylor & Francis Group. - 1600-910X .- 2159-9149. ; 22:3, s. 376-396
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The rise of authoritarian populism has forced many democracies to consider how best to defend democracy against its inner enemies. In the literature on democratic self-defense, one often distinguishes between three models: a legal (militant), political (procedural) and social (integrational). If much scholarly attention is on the merits and limits of the first two models, the social model has fallen behind. This is surprising given its success in the interwar years in many Scandinavian countries, and the empirical correlation between high levels of social equality and high levels of political tolerance. This article examines the merits and limits of the social model. More specifically, it makes two contributions. First, it introduces ‘the social security’ approach proposed by early Swedish social democratic thinkers as an alternative to ‘the social homogeneity’ approach proposed by Hermann Heller. The aim is to show that they provide different solutions to the loser's dilemma: the fact that losers in a democratic election must be ready to support the winners, whose decisions are at odds with their own convictions. Second, the article examines a common objection against the social security approach, namely, that it politicizes democracy, and thereby undermines the distinction between procedure and substance in the defense of democracy
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| 10. |
- Palm, Fredrik, 1973-
(författare)
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Addiction phobia : Foucault, abstract governance, and the fascination with materiality in contemporary critical studies of addiction
- 2023
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Ingår i: Distinktion. - : Routledge. - 1600-910X .- 2159-9149. ; 24:3, s. 488-507
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This article explores how the field of critical addiction studies – which can be traced back to the late twentieth century – has used Foucauldian social theory on governance to challenge dominant biomedical and moralistic models of addiction and to account for the ways in which addiction discourse and practice reproduce purifying, essentialist and singular assumptions about behaviour, bodies and desire. Starting from Foucault’s late critique of the neoliberalist phobia of the state, and Dean and Villadsen’s subsequent analysis of how this phobia ironically appears to haunt Foucauldian as well as other versions of poststructuralist social theory, the article asks whether a similar phobic tendency can be identified in Foucauldian accounts of addiction, although in this case directed towards addiction as a discursive centre. Analysing accounts of addiction provided by several critical addiction scholars, the article investigates how this more general tendency in relation to Foucauldian and poststructuralist theory is enacted in and structures a number of key points in contemporary critiques of addiction. Through detailed analyses of how critics have framed addiction as governmentality and an epidemics of the will, related addiction to habit, dealt with tensions within the discourse of addiction, raised issues of materiality, and aligned themselves with the heterogeneity of bodies, behaviours, and desires, the article claims that the field of critical addiction studies reduces addiction to abstract governance and avoids seriously engaging with the structure and dynamics of addiction from a decentred social theoretical perspective.
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| 11. |
- Pettersson, Jonna
(författare)
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Civic integration and the negation of collective selfhood : A normative analysis through Paul Ricoeur’s notions of identity
- 2024
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Ingår i: Distinktion. - : Informa UK Limited. - 1600-910X .- 2159-9149. ; , s. 1-24
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Requirements of immigrants to prove language skills, undertake knowledge tests, or complete courses of civic education, have become central in the process of attaining formal legal membership in the political community. However, while civic integration often is furthered as an emancipatory process and way to strengthen social cohesion, this article maintains that civic integration deviates from a notion of integration as the mutual transformation of migrant and receiving polity alike. Drawing on Paul Ricoeur’s discussion of ipse- and idem-identity, the article analyses the normative underpinnings of civic integration and argues that civic integration is conditioned on a community based in sameness rather than in an inclusive and reciprocal respect for diversity, meaning that civic integration will emerge as strikingly similar to the assimilationist practices it seeks to overcome. Thus, drawing on idem-identity, civic integration is seen to not only defeat its own goals of political emancipation of the migrant and the social cohesion of the community, but also to negate the very possibility of collective selfhood. By contrast, through exploring Ricoeur’s notion of identity as imbued with temporality, this article gestures towards how the normative standards of reflexivity, tolerance and mutuality ought to guide any idea of integration.
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| 12. |
- Pettersson, Jonna
(författare)
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Rethinking political subjectification : equality beyond a community of sameness
- 2011
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Ingår i: Distinktion. - : Informa UK Limited. - 1600-910X .- 2159-9149. ; 12:3, s. 255-269
-
Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Attempts to engage critically with citizenship, both within critical human rights theory and within cosmopolitan and multicultural citizenship theory, often underline how the status of the citizen has ceased to be perceived as a privilege and is instead viewed in terms of universal access to political rights and political participation. The political man is thus constituted by his citizenship and not the other way around. As a consequence, the universal rights of man have disappeared into the particular rights of the citizen as the emancipated individual man they seek to address has turned into a member of a people.This article aims to reconsider the critique forwarded by critical human rights theory and argues that it reasserts the division between those capable of doing politics and those who are not, through excluding the latter from any political sphere and preventing them from articulating their own exclusion and inequality. The text further contends that both the cosmopolitan and multicultural views on citizenship draw on an identitarian politics, which conflates equality with sameness and reproduces the hierarchy of inequalities it sets up.Instead, this article turns to Rancière's elaboration on the concept of equality, and discusses its consequences for political subjectification. It is suggested that Rancière's articulation of the political subject as one that defies the distinction between man and citizen through acts of disagreement resets the grounds for political inclusion. Rather than citizens, it is thus the stateless or the migrants, who challenge the borders of the community as well as its political consensus, that constitute political actors.
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| 13. |
- Sandell, Kerstin
(författare)
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Living the neurochemical self? : Experiences after the success of the SSRIs
- 2016
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Ingår i: Distinktion. - : Taylor & Francis. - 1600-910X .- 2159-9149. ; 17:2, s. 130-148
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This is an exploration, in dialogue with Nikolas Rose’s conceptualization of the neurochemical self, of how people taking antidepressants through in-depth interviews make sense of their experiences of using selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors. The neurochemical self, according to Rose, is a self understood as regulated by neurochemical processes, where how we feel is mapped onto the body, more precisely the brain. The findings suggest that one of Rose’s points – that the deep inner self informed by psychoanalysis is gone – has some bearing. However, the plasticity of the biological that Rose argues accompanies a neurochemical understanding that cannot be traced; rather, the understanding of depression is gravitating towards it being a biological, constitutional malfunctioning. Adding to this, even though the users experienced that the pills worked, their understandings bore no relation to the wider neurochemical framework and were riddled with uncertainty. As a conclusion it is suggested that depression is delinked from explanation, and exists in a void abandoned to containment by medicine, although not that effectively treated. In this, the only way to become a functioning subject once again seems to be to go on pills.
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| 14. |
- Sant, Edda, et al.
(författare)
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Thinking hegemony otherwise – an educational critique of Mouffe’s agonism
- 2024
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Ingår i: Distinktion. - : Taylor & Francis. - 1600-910X .- 2159-9149.
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The question ‘What is to be done?’ underpins Chantal Mouffe’s agonistic theory of democratic politics. Yet, despite this affirmative tone that distinguishes her from other radical theorists, her theory neglects the cultural work required for hegemony-building. This omission has resulted in operational difficulties when agonistic democracy is put into practice. This article shows how academics inspired by Mouffe unintentionally depend on theoretical resources from competing democratic theories. As a result of this, agonistic practices risk to reinforce neo-liberal regimes instead of developing counter-hegemonic alternatives. To meet this challenge, and to expand the scope of Mouffe’s agonism, we draw on educational theory to provide a more developed theorization of the cultural work required for hegemony-building. We propose that only by embracing different conceptualisations of education, we can activate cultural interventions that facilitate counter-hegemonic ventures.
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| 15. |
- Wedin, Tomas, 1981-, et al.
(författare)
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Ancient equality against modern democracy : resources of critique in Hannah Arendt and Ellen Meiksins Wood
- 2019
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Ingår i: Distinktion. - Abingdon : Routledge. - 1600-910X .- 2159-9149. ; 21:1, s. 19-45
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Increasing discontent with the current status of democracy has prompted a renewed interest in Athenian democracy. This article contributes with the first comparative analysis of two political theoreticians–Hannah Arendt and Ellen Meiksins Wood–whose reactivations of ancient political experiences significantly predate recent trends. Despite the fact that Arendt levelled fierce critique against the Marxist tradition of which Wood was a part, it is shown how both thinkers involved a close consideration of the relation between the social/economic and the political in their analyses; regarded Athenian forms of equality as the differentia specifica when measured against modernincarnations of democracy; committed themselves to the controversial move to grant slavery a marginal role in their analyses; turned to the American Revolution to discern the specificity of the ancient forms equality and modern democracy; and how both departed from the mainstream definitions of democracy as a list of institutions or a number of criteria. We argue that Arendt and Wood reach similar conclusions about the distinctive form of separation between the political and the social/economic in Athens, reach different conclusions about the distinctive forms of collapse and separation respectively in the modern epoch, but nonetheless unite in their critique of the American Revolution. On those premises, the central aim is to investigate how the reactivation of Athenian equality can serve as a resource for critique of three forms of equality that underpins democracy in the modern age, which we designate formal, distributive and imaginary equality. © 2019 The Author(s)
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| 16. |
- Wennerhag, Magnus, 1973-
(författare)
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Another Modernity is Possible? : The Global Justice Movement and the Transformations of Politics
- 2010
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Ingår i: Distinktion. - : Taylor & Francis. - 1600-910X .- 2159-9149. ; 11:2, s. 25-49
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Using and expanding upon the conception of ‘successive modernities’ that has recently been developed within social theory, this article offers an interpretation of the political aims, ideas, and practices of the ‘global justice movement’ and argues that this contemporary social movement is best understood as an expression of the tensions characterizing the prevailing configuration of Western modernity in our own time. Social movements have often simultaneously challenged, changed, and sustained the institutions, norms, and habits of modern societies. Placing the global justice movement in this historical context, the author elaborates how the notion of the creative capacities of social movements has hitherto been discussed in several major theories about social movements and modernity. The article argues that the movements mobilized since the 1990s in response to issues related to globalization should neither be seen as revolts against the demise of ‘organized modernity’, nor as heralding a new type of Western modernity. Instead, the critique and political claims of the global justice movement are, according to the author, better interpreted as expressing a will to realize a ‘third modernity’ in an alternative way that stresses the values of participatory democracy, democratization of international economic institutions, and the strengthening of social equality on a global level. Thus, the movement should foremost be seen as articulating a crisis in the forms of politics and democracy during our present epoch of modernity.
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| 17. |
- Wide, Sverre, 1973-
(författare)
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Causation and reason : R.G. Collingwood and causal analysis as the essence of social thinking
- 2017
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Ingår i: Distinktion. - : Taylor & Francis. - 1600-910X .- 2159-9149. ; 18:2, s. 173-195
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- How are we to understand causal relations and analysis in social science? This paper takes R. G. Collingwood’s writing about causation as its point of departure for the answering of this question. Two different kinds of causal relations are distinguished from pseudo-causality; of the former, one is directly connected to reason, the other to our ability to manipulate the world. Their interconnection and significance are discussed and th econclusions are drawn that (a) causality belongs to the realm of human praxis and that (b) causal analysis proper is well suited forthe social sciences. It is further showed that some important explanations are not causal in any of the above-mentioned senses. These explanations could conceivably be called interpretative descriptions, but it is suggested that perhaps they can be understood as examples of causa sui, of something selfcaused.
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| 18. |
- Cassegård, Carl, 1971
(författare)
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Eco-Marxism and the critical theory of nature: two perspectives on ecology and dialectics
- 2017
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Ingår i: Distinktion : Scandinavian Journal of Social Theory. - 1600-910X. ; 18:3, s. 314-332
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- As John Bellamy Foster points out in numerous publications, we need Marx to make sense of our current ecological predicament in the Anthropocene, the age in which humankind affects the earth in the manner of a geological force. The article focuses on the relation between eco-Marxism and the critical theory of nature, two currents both focusing on how to understand nature from a broadly Marxian perspective. I assess the criticism eco-Marxists like Burkett and Foster have directed at Alfred Schmidt and the early Frankfurt School and argue that the friction between the two currents to a large extent stems from different conceptions of dialectics and materialism. Next I turn to, and criticize, Foster’s attempt to use an Epicurean-inspired model of dialectics to ensure unity of method in the study of nature and society. Finally, turning to the critical theory of nature as exemplified by Theodor Adorno, I argue that the critical theory of nature offers theoretical tools for grasping the relation between nature and capitalism that are far more useful for grasping the present ecological crisis than Foster and Burkett appear to think. The contributions offered by critical theory include its dialectical approach to the categories of nature and society, a thoroughgoing anti-idealism based on the notion of the ‘preponderance of the object’, the use of constellations to accommodate natural science and a heightened sensitivity to the entwinement of ideological and utopian aspects in the notion of nature.
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| 19. |
- Heidegren, Carl-Göran
(författare)
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Social Characterology. From the Protestant Ethic, via the Social Ethic, to the Hacker Ethic
- 2005
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Ingår i: Distinktion: Scandinavian Journal of Social Theory. - 1600-910X. ; , s. 87-95
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Starting out from Max Weber's "The Protestant Ethic" the article focuses on a number of authors – David Riesman, William H. Whyte, Daniel Bell and Pekka Himanen – who have used that book as a reference point in their endeavours to capture the spirit of their time. Key themes in the article are ways of life, the formation of social character and charcterological struggle.
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| 20. |
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| 21. |
- Lundberg, Henrik, 1970
(författare)
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Intellectual Life in Sociological Light
- 2016
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Ingår i: Distinktion : Scandinavian Journal of Social Theory. - 1600-910X. ; 17:1, s. 120-125
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Recension (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)
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| 22. |
- Lundberg, Henrik, 1970
(författare)
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‘Science of science’, reason, and truth: Bourdieu's failed case against cognitive relativism
- 2012
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Ingår i: Distinktion: Scandinavian Journal of Social Theory. - 1600-910X. ; 13:2, s. 169-186
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- In a series of lectures delivered shortly before his retirement, Pierre Bourdieu claimed to have solved, with the help of his version of the sociology of science, the philosophical problem regarding the social conditioning of knowledge and truth. At the same time, he also proposed to have effectively countered any relativistic views of science. In this article, I contend that Bourdieu’s project to develop an argument against cognitive relativism nevertheless fell short of its goal, owing to his confusion between consensus and absolute truth. It is absolute truth that is the opposite of relativism, not consensus. In addition, Bourdieu’s project fails in its attempt to refute relativism on empirical grounds. An empirical argument has only limited value as an argument against cognitive relativism. Moreover, Bourdieu’s overly sharp distinction between natural-scientific and social scientific research, if consistently followed, carries the risk of throwing sociology of science back into a Mannheimian sociology-of-knowledge mould.
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| 23. |
- Milne, Richard, et al.
(författare)
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Fraught cuisine: food scares and the modulation of anxieties
- 2011
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Ingår i: Distinktion: Scandinavian Journal of Social Theory. - 1600-910X. ; 12:2, s. 177-192
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This paper explores the circulation of contemporary anxieties related to food through an engagement with sociological and geographical work on affect. The paper draws on four case studies of ‘food scares’ in the UK and Sweden to consider the emergence, circulation and expression of food anxieties. It suggests that existing analyses of food anxiety neglect its affective dimensions, and that the circulation of concerns about food is an affective and embodied process as well as a cognitive one, taking place through encounters between heterogeneous bodies at a range of temporal and spatial scales. However, it argues that the movement of affect should not be considered as a linear ‘manipulation’ of mute subjects, but rather as a circulation of affective intensity that moves through heterogeneous milieux and is open to ‘modulation’. In contrast to manipulation, the modulation of affect is constituted through interactions and encounters, making its outcome unpredictable and uncertain.
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| 24. |
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| 25. |
- Mukhtar-Landgren, Dalia, et al.
(författare)
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From senses to sensors : autonomous cars and probing what machine learning does to mobilities studies
- 2023
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Ingår i: Distinktion. - 1600-910X. ; 24:2, s. 301-314
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Cars are nowadays being programmed to learn how to drive themselves. While autonomous cars are often portrayed as the next step in the auto-motive industry, they have already begun roaming the streets in some US cities. Building on a growing body of critical scholarship on the development of autonomous cars, we explore what machine learning is in open environments like cities by juxtaposing this to the field of mobilities studies. We do so by revisiting core concepts in mobilities studies: movement, representation and embodied experience. Our analysis of machine learning is centred around the transition from human senses to sensors mounted on cars, and what this implies in terms of autonomy. While much of the discussions related to this transition are already foregrounded in mobilities studies, due to this field's emphasis on complexities and the understanding of automobility as a socio-technological system, questions about autonomy still emerge in a slightly new light with the advent of machine learning. We conclude by suggesting that in mobilities studies, autonomy has always been seen as intertwined with technology, yet we argue that machine learning unfolds autonomy as intrinsic to technology, as the space between the car, the driver and the context is collapsing with autonomous cars.
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| 26. |
- Pettersson, Jonna
(författare)
-
Rethinking political subjectification: equality beyond a community of sameness
- 2011
-
Ingår i: Distinktion: Scandinavian Journal of Social Theory. - 1600-910X. ; 12:3, s. 255-269
-
Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Attempts to engage critically with citizenship, both within critical human rights theory and within cosmopolitan and multicultural citizenship theory, often underline how the status of the citizen has ceased to be perceived as a privilege and is instead viewed in terms of universal access to political rights and political participation. The political man is thus constituted by his citizenship and not the other way around. As a consequence, the universal rights of man have disappeared into the particular rights of the citizen as the emancipated individual man they seek to address has turned into a member of a people. This article aims to reconsider the critique forwarded by critical human rights theory and argues that it reasserts the division between those capable of doing politics and those who are not, through excluding the latter from any political sphere and preventing them from articulating their own exclusion and inequality. The text further contends that both the cosmopolitan and multicultural views on citizenship draw on an identitarian politics, which conflates equality with sameness and reproduces the hierarchy of inequalities it sets up. Instead, this article turns to Rancière's elaboration on the concept of equality, and discusses its consequences for political subjectification. It is suggested that Rancière's articulation of the political subject as one that defies the distinction between man and citizen through acts of disagreement resets the grounds for political inclusion. Rather than citizens, it is thus the stateless or the migrants, who challenge the borders of the community as well as its political consensus, that constitute political actors.
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| 27. |
- Ringmar, Erik
(författare)
-
Lucid Dreams, Perfect Nightmares: Consciousness, Capitalism and Our Sleeping Selves
- 2016
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Ingår i: Distinktion: Scandinavian Journal of Social Theory. - 1600-910X. ; 17:3, s. 355-362
-
Forskningsöversikt (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Review article discussing three books: Thompson, Evan. Waking, Dreaming, Being: Self and Consciousness in Neuroscience, Meditation, and Philosophy. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014. Mavromatis, Andreas. Hypnagogia: The Unique State of Consciousness between Wakefulness and Sleep. London: Thyrsos Press, 2010. Crary, Jonathan. 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep. London: Verso, 2014.
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| 28. |
- Törnberg, Anton, 1985
(författare)
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Prefigurative politics and social change: a typology drawing on transition studies
- 2021
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Ingår i: Distinktion : Scandinavian Journal of Social Theory. - 1600-910X. ; 22:1, s. 83-107
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Recent years have seen a surge of interest in prefigurative politics, which refers to the political strategies that model a future society on a micro level and aim to instantiate radical social change in and through practice. While most previous studies have focused on defining the concept and categorizing various types of prefiguration, this paper contributes by investigating under what circumstances prefiguration leads to revolutionary social change. The paper takes an original approach to these issues by turning to transition studies and the socio-technical change literature. This field focuses on the technical equivalence of prefiguration: namely, the relationship between small-scale niche innovations and large-scale technological transitions. Through theoretical discussions and empirical illustrations, this paper presents a typology of five transition pathways through which prefigurative strategies may result in a range of social change outcomes from reformative to revolutionary transformation.
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| 29. |
- Wahlström, Mattias, 1978
(författare)
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Unformulable Practices? Articulating Practical Understanding in Sociological Theory
- 2006
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Ingår i: Distinktion: Scandinavian Journal of Social Theory. - 1600-910X. ; 7:2, s. 121-139
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This essay proposes an argument that supports a pragmatic standpoint in relation to sociological description and theorization. The argument is based on a Wittgensteinian approach to human action and tacit knowledge. Taking as a starting point a controversy concerning the role of language in social practices, it is argued that the whole idea of tacit knowledge, in the sense of in principle unformulable knowledge, is based on a misconception of the nature of description. Theorizing or describing a practice is best conceived as a translation from one social practice to another. Thus, formulability can only be comprehended as a relation between two practices, not as a general characteristic of a practice. The quality of a description, or theory, is dependent on the use one tries to make of it within another practice.
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| 30. |
- Wedin, Tomas, 1981, et al.
(författare)
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Ancient equality against modern democracy: resources of critique in Hannah Arendt and Ellen Meiksins Wood
- 2020
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Ingår i: Distinktion : Scandinavian Journal of Social Theory. - 1600-910X. ; 21:1, s. 19-45
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Increasing discontent with the current status of democracy has prompted a renewed interest in Athenian democracy. This article contributes with the first comparative analysis of two political theoreticians – Hannah Arendt and Ellen Meiksins Wood – whose reactivations of ancient political experiences significantly predate recent trends. Despite the fact that Arendt levelled fierce critique against the Marxist tradition of which Wood was a part, it is shown how both thinkers involved a close consideration of the relation between the social/economic and the political in their analyses; regarded Athenian forms of equality as the differentia specifica when measured against modern incarnations of democracy; committed themselves to the controversial move to grant slavery a marginal role in their analyses; turned to the American Revolution to discern the specificity of the ancient forms equality and modern democracy; and how both departed from the mainstream definitions of democracy as a list of institutions or a number of criteria. We argue that Arendt and Wood reach similar conclusions about the distinctive form of separation between the political and the social/economic in Athens, reach different conclusions about the distinctive forms of collapse and separation respectively in the modern epoch, but nonetheless unite in their critique of the American Revolution. On those premises, the central aim is to investigate how the reactivation of Athenian equality can serve as a resource for critique of three forms of equality that underpins democracy in the modern age, which we designate formal, distributive and imaginary equality.
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| 31. |
- Wilén, Carl, 1986
(författare)
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Remarks on the sceptical turn in the historiography of the Haitian Revolution. Lessons from the art of abstraction
- 2023
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Ingår i: Distinktion : Scandinavian Journal of Social Theory. - 1600-910X. ; 24:1
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- One of the major arguments made in the current boom in Haitian revolutionary studies connects today’s conditions of possibility for modern democracy and human rights to the abolition of slavery during the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804). During the last decade, however, this connection between the Haitian Revolutionary period and our own age has been questioned by an increasing number of scholars: a phenomenon that this article conceptualizes as the ‘sceptical turn’. The article argues that the sceptical turn consummates its critique through unacknowledged rearrangements of abstractions, and therefore misses its target. A corresponding critique of the sceptical turn is formulated here using Bertell Ollman’s tripartite concept of the abstractions of vantage point, extension, and generality. Ollman’s notion enables a shift of focus onto modes – instead of the more common focus on levels – of abstraction. Thus, the author argues, contra the sceptical turn, not only that the connection between the Haitian Revolution and the political and social situation of today is plausible, but that it also provides a more profound conceptual basis for analyses of revolutionary events in general.
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