Showing papers in "Subjectivity in 2014"
TL;DR: In this article, the human through critical disability studies and the theories of Rosi Braidotti is explored, and a posthuman condition is argued to be replaced by the human condition.
Abstract: This article explores the human through critical disability studies and the theories of Rosi Braidotti. We ask: What does it mean to be human in the twenty-first century and in what ways does disability enhance these meanings? In addressing this question we seek to work through entangled connections of nature, society, technology, medicine, biopower and culture to consider the extent to which the human might be an outdated phenomenon, replaced by Braidotti’s posthuman condition. We then introduce disability as a political category, an identity and a moment of relational ethics. Critical disability studies, we argue, are perfectly at ease with the posthuman because disability has always contravened the traditional classical humanist conception of what it means to be human. Disability also invites a critical analysis of the posthuman. We examine the ways in which disability and posthuman work together, enhancing and complicating one another in ways that raise important questions about the kinds of life and death we value. We consider three of Braidotti’s themes in relation to disability: (i) Life beyond the self: Rethinking enhancement; (ii) Life beyond the species: Rethinking animal; (iii) Life beyond death: Rethinking death. We conclude by advocating a posthuman disability studies that responds directly to contemporary complexities around the human while celebrating moments of difference and disruption.
214 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the authors propose a strategy of incorporating cognitive science into affect theory that returns to a pre-positivist analytics of experimentation found within early psychology, and explore what might be at stake in such strategies of appropriation and re-invention.
Abstract: This article is a response to an increasing rapprochement taking place between the humanities and the sciences, and specifically between cultural theory and the cognitive sciences within the field of affect studies. The focus of the article will be on the area of automaticity research in both its past and present formations. This field of research has furnished cultural theorists with concepts and theories for animating affect and therefore provides a fruitful intersection for interdisciplinary enquiry. The article offers a strategy of incorporating cognitive science into affect theory that returns to a pre-positivist analytics of experimentation found within early psychology. When this analytics is brought into dialogue with science and technology studies and performative approaches to experimentation, the problematic of subjectivity is not displaced or elided but rather becomes a central recurring issue. It will explore what might be at stake in such strategies of appropriation and re-invention.
33 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors trace and situate agency empirically through practices and show that for things to happen, a lot of work has to be done, while the actors involved are diverse, agency is located in practices.
Abstract: As of late, claims have been made in social and political theory that agency is neither a property of subjects nor of objects, but is instead an emergent effect of constellations or assemblages – that agency takes place ‘between’ various things. The question that follows is how to then account for what happens and what to make of the ‘betweenness’ of agency. The answer offered by this article is to trace and situate agency empirically through practices. Exploring the happening and non-happening of a particular object – shit – I show that for things to happen, a lot of work has to be done. By evoking three examples of constipated bodies, I show that while the work that has to be done is different, and that the actors involved are diverse, agency is located in practices.
30 citations
TL;DR: The authors discuss intimate practices of self-medication in relation to political preoccupations with the ethics of the pharmaceutical economy, and discursive constructions of illness, and suggest that the experience and performative effects of selfmedication lie not only in the activation of chemical compounds, but in the conscious bodily animation of cognitive and affective relations with medications.
Abstract: In this article, I discuss intimate practices of self-medication in relation to political preoccupations with the ethics of the pharmaceutical economy, and discursive constructions of illness. Partly self-ethnographic, the article draws from my personal experience of clinical depression, and the discomforts in thinking of myself as a ‘depressed’ subject who consumes medications. Intervening in debates on new materialism and affect studies, I offer an account of dynamics where the material and the discursive, the human and the non-human, the personal and the political converge. I suggest that the experience and performative effects of self-medication lie not only in the activation of chemical compounds, but in the conscious bodily animation of cognitive and affective relations with medications. In this analysis, I employ creative forms of writing, to find a language of distress that blurs the boundary between the material and the discursive.
27 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the authors explore the set of practices promoted by the Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh and reflect on the articulations of meditation and environmentalism, exploring the potential of meditation practices to tackle the current ‘ecological crisis.
Abstract: This article explores the set of practices promoted by the Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh and reflects on the articulations of meditation and environmentalism. Informed by current debates in Science and Technology Studies, I reflect on the role of meditation in the construction of an ecology of the self. Through the analysis of practices of mindfulness, this article investigates a variety of devices recruited to transform subjectivities, enacting relational and interconnected versions of selfhood, opposed to the modern and dualistic paradigm of subjectivity. I reflect on the performative, experiential and social dimensions of these relational ontologies, exploring the potential of meditation practices to tackle the current ‘ecological crisis’.
16 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the authors investigate the neurobiological, subjective and socio-cultural entanglements of disease, pain and dying and the challenges such hybridisations present for attempts to recognise and alleviate suffering.
Abstract: Three stories about dying migrants in the United Kingdom are at the heart of this article. Working with these narratives, I investigate the neurobiological, subjective and socio-cultural entanglements of disease, pain and dying and the challenges such hybridisations present for attempts to recognise and alleviate suffering. My aim is to show the differential workings of hybridising forces with regard to assumed correspondences and time, as well as the indeterminate and liminal states of subjective experience that disease can amplify. The article engages with the growing literature on ‘social pain’ and suggests that social pain is the mortar rather than merely a reflection of the affects and neurology of transnational migrations, loss and social violation.
15 citations
TL;DR: This paper investigated the impact of education initiative Value-added education on educational processes of subjectification that administer individuals in such a way that they learn to desire a particular type of socioeconomic optimization; one that is driven by a constant lack and lifelong desire to overcome poverty and disease.
Abstract: This study maps out neoliberal processes of subjectification that are instantiated through discourses that depict non-privatized public schools and individuals as impoverished, deficient, disastrous and lacking. My study investigates neoliberal discourses of lack, disease and disaster as technologies of power, which facilitate privatized interventions into processes that shape subjectivity and neoliberal governmentality. My research examines the processes of subjectification that motivate individuals to learn a perpetual existence of lack; conditioning, namely, the homo aegrotus (the sick human) subject. To exemplify, I forefront education as a primary site in which these neoliberal discourses occur. I investigate the impact of education initiative Value-Added Education on educational processes of subjectification that administer individuals in such a way that they learn to desire a particular type of socio-economic optimization; one that is driven by a constant lack and lifelong desire to overcome poverty and disease.
11 citations
10 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors argue that the current social agenda constructed around the pursuit of happiness is enmeshed in a fundamental contradiction, and that happiness can be produced by a series of practices of self-monitoring that objectify emotions in order to produce the goal of a happy life.
Abstract: In this article I argue that the current social agenda constructed around the pursuit of happiness is enmeshed in a fundamental contradiction. The search for happiness acknowledges that happiness consists in a life lived beyond the self, but remains trapped within the orbit of what C.B. Macpherson has termed ‘possessive individualism’. This is the idea that we can own our own capacities as though they are a form of property. The promotion of happiness as an individual good promotes and extends an individualist agenda, and encourages the idea that happiness can be produced by a series of practices of self-monitoring that objectify emotions in order to produce the goal of a happy life. I utilise Axel Honneth’s account of a form of self-relationship as reification to give an account of how this search for happiness turns into a form of modern sickness.
9 citations
TL;DR: The authors discusses definitions and debates about the terms "hybridity" and "mixedness" across the natural and human and social sciences, including the work of the cultural theorist Homi Bhabha.
Abstract: This article discusses definitions and debates about the terms ‘hybridity’ and ‘mixedness’ across the natural and human and social sciences, including the work of the cultural theorist Homi Bhabha. Using the argonomic idea of homology, that refers to correspondences in both the quality and the states of a thing or phenomena, insights are offered into how we might think of the layers and processes of mixing that can be involved in the event of hybridity. This is particularly important because discussions of mixedness in the social sciences, and in everyday life, can run together different phenomena, strata, states, their sensual traits and their relative maturity or in/stabilities. In the process, different modalities of mixing can be subsumed or collapsed. The article also provides a summary of the key ideas and arguments made by contributors to the issue.
8 citations
TL;DR: It is argued that prescribing puberty blockers should not be seen as a straightforward ‘solution’ to early sexual development, and how the authors might take account of the psychological and physical worldliness of early developing children when evaluating puberty blockers is suggested.
Abstract: International epidemiological evidence demonstrates that more children than ever before now enter puberty before the age of 8. Early onset puberty can be an alarming experience for parents and is thought to entail short- and long-term physical and psychosocial risks, particularly for girls. ‘Puberty blocking’ hormonal medications are sometimes used to halt the progress of puberty in order to avoid these dangers. This article analyses medical and pharmaceutical discourses describing these medications, exploring how they articulate sex/gender, sexuality, age and health. Engaging with sociological literatures on pharmaceuticalisation and queer and feminist work on atypical sexual development and trans, I argue that prescribing puberty blockers should not be seen as a straightforward ‘solution’ to early sexual development. Learning from Elizabeth A. Wilson’s (2011) engagement with Karen Barad’s reconceptualising of bodies, I suggest how we might take account of the psychological and physical worldliness of early developing children when evaluating puberty blockers.
TL;DR: The authors used the philosophy of Felix Guattari to explore subjectivity among environmental consultants and found that the subjectivity of a market actor in the context of a critical appraisal of "assemblage theory" led to the complexity of subjectivities formed at interstices of markets and nature.
Abstract: This article uses the philosophy of Felix Guattari to explore subjectivity among environmental consultants. Drawing on his exploration of processes of enunciation in the context of a critical appraisal of ‘assemblage theory’, it looks at how one environmental consultant operates and makes senses of her world, how she understands her practices and beliefs, and how the world around her shapes her existence. In experimenting with refrains that are teased out of fieldwork material, it argues that Guattari’s examination of the production of subjectivity, his insistence on the variable relations between the material and the semiotic and the role that refrains have in disclosing complex territorial relations offer a useful counter to the homogeneous and abstracted register of meaning production that is presumed in much interpretation of qualitative interview data. The case of environmental consultants is developed as an example of the complex and contingent qualities of market action, contesting a view of the ‘market actor’ as the profit-hungry, value-free agent imagined by commentators on the nature of capitalism. Our Guattarian reading leads us to recognise the complexity of subjectivities formed at interstices of ‘markets’ and ‘nature’.
TL;DR: The affective qualities of watching provide a critique of the individualizing forces of supervision and an analysis of subjectivities generated by gender and class and generate seemingly contradictory outcomes wherein children are expected to gain independence and experience injury.
Abstract: As unintentional injuries continue to be the leading cause of hospitalization and death for toddlers between the ages of 1 and 4, the Centers for Disease Control has argued that child supervision is a key factor in reducing these injuries and fatalities. This article focuses on the affective relationships in the concept of supervision and practice of watching as an injury prevention method. Three parts frame our argument. First, we describe how watching is an ordinary affect. Second, as part of the ethos of caring, watching is embedded in a temporal frame of anticipation and gives rise to an affectsphere of watching and to a parents’ subjectivity as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ supervisors. Third, these affective relationships generate seemingly contradictory outcomes wherein children are expected to gain independence and experience injury. The affective qualities of watching provide a critique of the individualizing forces of supervision and an analysis of subjectivities generated by gender and class.
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors examine the South African state's discursive deployment of the African renaissance discourse to prompt a particular kind of HIV positive subjectivity, during the years 1996-2003.
Abstract: Our aim in this article is to examine the South African state’s discursive deployment of the African renaissance discourse to prompt a particular kind of HIV positive subjectivity, during the years 1996–2003. We interrogate this connection along two axes. First, the article offers an analysis of the state’s nudging of a new African subjectivity. Second, we examine the state’s representation of a new African HIV positive subjectivity. In this way, the representation of a new African subjectivity – and subsequently a new HIV positive subjectivity – and the realization of the African renaissance discourse of a reconstructed Africa were mutually supporting. A critical analysis of the state and the treatment lobby group’s representational practices implicates both in prompting the formation of an HIV positive subject who is rational, dignified and free.
TL;DR: The authors examined the impact of neoliberalism on forms of subjectivity by looking at social centres (squatted activist community centres) in London from 2007 to 2009 and explored the concept of outmodedness understood as a temporal misalignment away from the pacings required by neoliberalism.
Abstract: The article examines neoliberalism’s impact on forms of subjectivity by looking at social centres (squatted activist community centres) in London from 2007 to 2009. With a focus on issues related to temporality, it explores the concept of outmodedness understood as a temporal misalignment away from the pacings required by neoliberalism. This is examined not only in terms of objects and spaces proper to social centres, but most importantly through a possible recomposition of the subject in this setting. Resistance to neoliberal norms through a particular experience of outmodedness is seen as ambivalent, leading to a possible immobilization of the subject and yet also towards non-capitalist modes of experience.
TL;DR: This paper examined how the mixed ancestry of African and Mexican Americans was treated, both in law and discourse, in distinctly contrasting ways in the early 20th century, arguing that black and Mexican subjects were positioned in qualitatively different ways in relation to whiteness, and that the singular treatment of black blood as a social toxin, a construction emerging within the specific circumstances of American slavery, also informed the subjective positioning of Mexicans, as well as shaping some Mexican Americans' responses to racism.
Abstract: Using archival materials, I will examine how the mixed ancestry of African and Mexican Americans was treated, both in law and discourse, in distinctly contrasting ways in the early twentieth century. I will argue that black and Mexican subjects were positioned in qualitatively different ways in relation to whiteness. Furthermore, the singular treatment of ‘black blood’ as a social toxin, a construction emerging within the specific circumstances of American slavery, also informed the subjective positioning of Mexicans, as well as shaping some Mexican Americans’ responses to racism.
TL;DR: In this article, a research interview extract in which Liyanna introduces the topic of her ‘mixed’ new baby, where they trace the affect in the interchange.
Abstract: We take readers directly to a research interview extract in which Liyanna introduces the topic of her ‘mixed’ new baby, where we trace the affect in the interchange. Our purpose is to conceptualise an event of production of subjectivity, specifically Liyanna’s talking about her daughter’s appearance, through the triune relations among discourses (about and constituting or marking differences), the bodily schema to which ‘mixed’ refers and psychic change as a key feature of subjective becoming. After situating our research data, methodology and theoretical resources, we focus on two interview extracts in order to show how Liyanna’s use of a mixedness discourse draws on her imaginative resources, and on her own and the interviewer’s containment, in the thinking space afforded by the interview encounter; space for making sense and finding comfort. In this way, Liyanna’s subjectivity-in-process vitalises a process of parental ethnic mixing and contributes to cultural hybridity.
TL;DR: In this paper, the parallax view is developed with reference to Marx's labour theory of value and commodity fetishism in an attempt to show that dividing historical materialism into 'dialectical' and 'historical' camps is at best an analytic distinction, at worst a mechanical and false one.
Abstract: What Žižek has dubbed ‘the parallax view’ is here developed with reference to Marx’s labour theory of value and commodity fetishism in an attempt to show that dividing historical materialism into ‘dialectical’ and ‘historical’ camps is at best an analytic distinction, at worst a mechanical and false one. In emphasizing that the Subject is a product of the Symbolic, and yet the Symbolic is the product of the Subject, it can be seen that one cannot do history without simultaneously talking about the forms of consciousness that are in effect the historical, changing face of the Subject itself. This can be seen not only in Capital, but also in Marx’s ‘political works’ – this is argued by turning to Žižek’s discussion of Class Struggles in France. This is contrary to a Lacanian-inspired reading of historical materialism in which the Real is prioritized and taken as a primordial generator of the Symbolic order as well as readings of Žižek’s work that miss the significance of ‘parallax’.
TL;DR: In this paper, a recent surge of interest in biological approaches to literature is discussed, and the essay discusses a Darwinian approach and its implications for literary criticism, and it aims at reassessing the constitutive force of the imagination and language.
Abstract: In the light of a recent surge of interest in biological approaches to literature, the essay discusses a Darwinian approach and its implications for literary criticism. To borrow from Rose’s description of biology, Darwinian literary critics make claims about ‘who we are, about the forces that shape the deepest aspects of our personalities’. It is therefore not just literature that is at stake in an evolutionary approach, but also the subject’s place in relation to the natural world and society. A dialogue between literary studies and the sciences is necessary and the dissatisfaction with a post-modern jargon and the (post-)structuralist neglect of the body is understandable. Yet reliance on a human nature that constitutes the basis of a causal chain tying biology to literature is problematic. First, this essay questions ‘literary Darwinism’ as a method. Second, it aims at reassessing the constitutive force of the imagination and language. This question is of great actuality as post-structuralist conceptions of subjectivity are increasingly criticized while evolutionary explanations are gaining ground. The essay uses modernist writing as catalyst for thinking about these issues. As an intellectual moment, modernism prepared the ground for post-structuralist theory without anticipating its narrow focus on the signifier.
TL;DR: In this paper, a conceptual analysis of the notion of "resistance" in the context of ethnographic research on an expanding mass religious movement in contemporary India is carried out, and an alternate understanding of resistance in a hermeneutic that interweaves the phenomenological critiques of Hegelian philosophy, Kant's connections between ethics and freedom, and the pairing of resistance with transference in Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis is presented.
Abstract: This article undertakes a conceptual analysis of the notion of ‘resistance’ in the context of ethnographic research on an expanding mass religious movement in contemporary India. Sociologists usually see such growing religious phenomena as ‘fundamentalist’ and ‘reactionary’ and are skeptical of the component of social resistance to them. I argue that this reflects a flawed framing of ‘resistance’, in a teleological, modernist paradigm. Instead, this article advances an alternate understanding of ‘resistance’ in a hermeneutic that interweaves the phenomenological critiques of Hegelian philosophy, Kant’s connections between ethics and freedom, and the pairing of resistance with transference in Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis. Bringing the lessons of psychoanalytic practice with critical ethnography, I argue that such re-articulation of ‘resistance’ is indispensable for a radical epistemology that can encounter the infectious certitudes and new, global infrastructures of repressive power and violence.
TL;DR: In this article, the authors argue that issues around identity, difference, "mixedness" reached an impasse, and what displacements in terms of analytical framework would open the way for a new politics.
Abstract: Have issues around identity, difference, ‘mixedness’ reached an impasse? If so, what displacements in terms of analytical framework would open the way for a new politics? These are the underlying thoughts that guide the arguments in this article towards a position that is in solidarity with a politics of the commons. To do so, it draws from the kind of approaches developed in the work of those who emphasise the more-than-one, relational character of subjectivity, such as Bracha Ettinger, Gilbert Simondon, Karen Barad, Andy Clark and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, to outline an analytical framework that breaks with the privilege of sameness, identity and individualism in sustaining relations of power that rely on the dividing strategies of power to maintain oppressions of one kind or another.