Act Of Bad Faith Research Articles

Punk is Dead: Notes Toward the Apocalyptic Tone Adopted by Punk Rock

Punk is Dead:Notes Toward the Apocalyptic Tone Adopted by Punk Rock George C. Grinnel (bio) Philosophy, which once seemed passé, remains alive because the moment of its realization was missed. Theodor Adorno Negative Dialeics I wonder which came first in 1979: Dick Hebdige's foundational analysis of the rise of punk rock, Subculture: The Meaning of Style, or the pronouncement by Crass, "Yes that's right, punk is dead," in their song "Punk is Dead"? The two events stand as memorials erected to mark the demise of punk even as they create some of the conditions that would prove essential for the survival of punk beyond its death. What does the pronouncement of death mean for punk culture and how might it be thought as a productive force that organizes the subculture in certain ways? What kinds of meaning and effects does it generate, and what ways of thinking and acting does it make more or less conceivable? Such questions become all the more pressing when one considers that punk has never quite ended, even if the death of punk has been proclaimed anew repeatedly since that time. Punk is powerfully attached to this rhetoric and its conceptual promise to do much more than simply pronounce its own demise. To what ends do punks speak about the death of punk? What [End Page 53] desires does this tone represent? What does this apocalyptic rhetoric accomplish? It might appear that to speak of the death of punk is an act of bad faith on my part or, worse, a failure to appreciate all of the ways it continues to inspire vibrant and strange expressions of music, community, and ethics. Punk remains alive and well globally in all sorts of local manifestations, and its effects continue to include the creation of identifiably punk music, even if what that sounds like changes for different times and places. It remains dangerous to be punk for some more than others, as the experiences of Pussy Riot in Russia show. Punk remains much more than music. It is an incubator, "a mechanism and a set of guiding principles" (Biel 3), that is as lively today as it ever was, with the audacity of Do It Yourself culture emboldening individuals to create the culture they want in creative and thoughtful ways that aspire to avoid exploitation and profit, appreciate community and strangeness, celebrate rebellion and newfound rituals, risk screwing up, and following one's ideals. Punk has perhaps never looked less like a dead end. Punks like Shawna Potter support others to confront harassment and intimidation and create positive environments with her book Making Spaces Safer as well as her activities fronting the band War on Women; David Norman releases hand-dipped diy cassette tapes and continues the tradition of truly independent non-commercial music distribution with Zegema Beach Records; and Reid Chancellor is expanding what it means to say "punk rock saved our lives" with his graphic novel Hardcore Anxiety: A Graphic Guide to Punk Rock and Mental Health. So, the question is not where did it go? How did it die? Punk never left, and it still provides a home for so many who might not find one elsewhere. Why, then, does punk so urgently and continually assert its demise? From the beginning, there has been nothing but the end of punk. Crass is correct: punk was dead by 1979. In the uk, it had become mainstream with its dissident visual economy sublimated into fashion while its anti-commercial protest music became profit-generating discord for major record labels. Yet punk died too young and was never quite finished by this death. What continued in Europe, Canada, and the United States, and eventually all over the globe during the next forty years, distinguished itself from the birth and death of punk in the uk. When punk emigrated—if a spatial metaphor can be allowed for a transformation that involved much more than simple relocation and certainly none of the permanence this term might suggest—it was no longer rooted in the confrontational mode Dick Hebdige documented as a "resistance in which experienced contradictions and objections to ruling ideology are obliquely represented in [End Page...

Towards a Genealogy of Minor Colonial Australian Character Types

The business of colonization is often understood in terms of global frameworks, large-scale movements and top-down, ‘abstract’ perspectives; in which case, the turn to minor characters in the colonized world might seem almost like an act of bad faith. It runs the risk of breaking open stable, overarching categories, like the ‘white man’ – which, as minor characters are introduced, sometimes struggles to retain its ascendancy. This essay pursues the idea of minor settler types in colonial Australia as points of departure or differentiation from the macro-narratives of colonial discourse. Sometimes they do consolidate into something dominant, but they can also disassemble into peripheral identities that the nation might continue to invest in or want to leave behind, depending on the case. The narratives they inhabit are therefore especially important, throwing types together, leading them in different, sometimes contradictory, directions, juxtaposing them with one another. This essay will look at colonial investments in a range of major and minor character types, including the Coming Australian, the rouseabout, the Melbourne dandy, the ‘night auctioneer’, the Sydney pieman and the ‘inspector of nuisances’. It introduces a Sydney-based magazine called Heads of the People (1847–8), which immediately raised – and did not resolve – the problem of who is central and who is peripheral to the colonial economy. The magazine self-consciously drew minor character types back into public life, recognizing that colonial literature – like the colonial economy itself – was continually assembled, and disassembled, by the narratives these figures inhabited.

Voting in Bad Faith

What is wrong with participating in a democratic decision-making process, and then doing something other than the outcome of the decision? It is often thought that collective decision-making entails being prima facie bound to the outcome of that decision, although little analysis has been done on why that is the case. Conventional perspectives are inadequate to explain its wrongness. I offer a new and more robust analysis on the nature of voting: voting when you will accept the outcome only if the decision goes your way is an act of bad faith: you are not taking part in a ‘process that decides what we will do’. This analysis sheds light on understanding the intrinsic nature of voting and what we are doing when we make decisions collectively.

An Existentialist Critique of Punishment

In this paper, I provide an account of the way in which practices of punitive justice in the United States permanently foreclose the possibility of an open future for the punished. I argue that participation in a system where those forms of punishment are utilized is an act of bad faith because it involves the denial of the existential freedom of others as well as our own. Using Hannah Arendt’s account of Adolf Eichmann I show how such acts of bad faith are both natural modes of thought as well as inherently dangerous. Finally, I demonstrate that existentialism provides us with the ability to recreate our relationship to others and resist acts of bad faith, especially when it comes to crime and punishment.

The Subject Supposed to Recycle

If Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism articulated the moral and theological coordinates of the subject of labor, how are these rearticulated today in the experience of the subject who consumes? The will to consume or not, and what to consume and how, has been a moral and religious problem since the most ancient times. And today these traces continue to haunt us, not just because are now veritably surrounded by commodities, but because of the way in which are today invited to respond to that situation. Today are supposed to recycle. We are told again and again of this need, and that it is to do so. That are supposed to take to recycle has almost reached the level of a duty or moral law, and this moral law circulates in the way symbolize acts of consumption. We are supposed to in the strong sense that should, moreover must, and to not do so would make us guilty of a breach. To choose not to recycle is an act of bad faith, a careless failure of duty, responsibility and care. But who is the we of this moral imperative? Who is this subject who is supposed to recycle? Where do locate, and is it possible to locate, the agent of this moral responsibility? These questions are fundamental if are to understand this contemporary moral injunction, and because of this are crucial if - but who this we is remains to be specified - are to respond to it. Between Weber and today what is different is not the religious nature of economic action. Rather there has been a transformation from what Weber presents as the idea of salvation through good works and above all of the promise of labor without end, to the permanent threat of the apocalypse that will overcome us if continue to consume in the way do.1 Generalized risk of apocalypse, then, a risk that presents itself as the almost inevitable endgame of capitalist overconsumption. But this time the apocalypse is not a threat from the outside but rather something on which can count, and for which are all ultimately responsible. We are responsible, many say, because it is our very own consumption choices, and the way that these coincide with production methods and distribution circuits that are clearly unsustainable, that are the root cause of the impending end of life on earth. But have it in our own hands to forestall this apocalypse, and in this sense are today invited into a for the planet that is accompanied by an almost paranoiac care of the self.2 It is these subjective correlates of this new moral imperative that I propose to bring into focus in this essay. These dynamics, which are immediately raised by the notion of the subject supposed to recycle, can be seen more broadly today in the value that is put on sustainable or ethical consumption more generally. By this, signal conscious efforts to make consumption choices that will have some broader benefits, often environmental but equally social, whether this is through choosing organic vegetables, fair trade coffee, dolphin-friendly tuna, ecological washing liquid, products from sustainable sources, or any of a range of carbonneutral or environmentally friendly products. Such products now clearly cover a significant area of economic activity, even if the consequences of such developments remain at present largely symbolic or ideological, which is not to diminish their importance. So although I will focus here on recycling, I do hope that these considerations might offer something of a contribution to clarifying the moral, religious and metaphysical grounds of consumption in contemporary capitalism more broadly. Before turning to the subject supposed to recycle and the two aspects ofthat subjectivity that I propose need to analyze - guilt and freedom - it may be useful to consider certain aspects of the ontological status of the subject and object of recycling, and in doing so to demonstrate the implications of what will be one of our guiding concerns, that is, the place in the subject and object of recycling of the trace of the Other. …

Welcoming without Reserve?: A Case in Christian Hospitality

In an interconnected and diverse world, Christians are called to hospitality. Yet this is no easy matter, for welcoming the stranger requires becoming vulnerable. A particular case in Christian hospitality illustrates the point. Hosting a Jewish funeral, a church community elected to cover its sanctuary's cross. While such an action can be seen as scandalous, an act of bad faith, I argue instead that it embodies hospitality—scandalous, indeed, but in a positive sense. On several accounts, this instance of covering the cross opens up new ways of thinking about being Christian in a religiously diverse world.

The Problem of Leasefarming in Eighteenth-century Piedmont and Lombardy

There are good reasons for taking up the problem of leasefarming in eighteenth-century Europe. The leasefarmer, paying cash rents in return for control over all the harvest, was the central figure in the physiocratic program of economic growth, the champion who could revive and expand the French economy with proper support from the laws. For the Swiss scholar Herbert Luethy, Quesnay's idea of winning the crown over to agriculture of large landed estates administered by 'capitalist farmers' was so much the apt attempt at saving the old regime from itself that, in comparison, Voltaire's attack on physiocracy, his UHomme aux quarante ecus (Geneva, 1768), coming from the pen of the feudal lord of Ferney, can only appear as an act of bad faith. Indeed, in a massive thesis of 1994 about the leasefarmers in the Ile-de-France in the fifteenth through the eighteenth centuries, the French historian Jean-Marc Moriceau has brought to life an astonishing collection of these physiocratic entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial families, whose secular accumulations of capital and leaseholds, whose technical achievements and social promotions, bringing wealth and status to themselves and enrichment to the national economy, are sufficiently impressive to raise doubts about the established understanding of pre-Revolutionary France as a brilliant but fatally sclerotic civilization. Conversely, the American Philip Hoffman, in a recent study in econometrics, claims that making sense of this kingdom