Constitutive Contradiction Research Articles

Fertile grounds: Co-creating agroecological knowledge in a pluriverse

How can civil society support community-based organizing that puts ways of knowing and being at the heart of food systems change? Drawing upon a collaboration between 2 nonprofit organizations and a community-based network of rural women across Bangladesh, this essay explores frictions and contradictions that trouble our efforts to co-create knowledge for agroecological transformations. Rather than suggesting these troubles can be resolved, we attempt to stay with them in this article, locating them as vital disruptions to the hegemonic order of one-world-making. Using personal vignettes as framing devices, we combine critical analysis, art, and poetry to explore working with and within a plurality of ways of knowing and being. With a vignette about soil, we begin with unsettling questions about what constitutes knowledge in a world where constructs of truth and belief rub up against each other. We then tension this in the context of agroecological markets and social justice activism as these intersect with different notions of relationality. We pursue this further by introducing a narrative-framing tool called a “value web” which mobilizes both material and immaterial domains of agroecology. Finally, we conclude by examining the role of international civil society in food system transformation and raising fundamental questions of allyship which help us navigate the constitutive contradictions of knowledge co-creation.

Sincere Intimacy, Genre and Heterotopology of a Confessional Public

ABSTRACT This article makes the case for confessional genre as a contemporary African literary form afforded by the intersection of politics, affect and mediatory conventions. I argue that contemporary Nigerian youths, through intimate and sincere revelatory writing practices, model heterotopic structures as correctives to normative orders, and that such Foucauldian spaces, contentiously expressed as space-within-a-space, are realised in, and materialise as, digital literary anthologies. Rethinking the literary anthology as heterotopia discloses seeming incompatible valences in confessional praxis and genre as constituting the kernel of a resistive commune. I tease out such valences by drawing on existing conceptions of publics and heterotopia and reading Thursday’s Children (Adeosun & Bello 2019), a digital anthology of personal essays, as confessional public. The article thinks through genre’s capture by technological regimes, capital and multiple economies of circulation to render confessional public’s techniques of mobilisation. These incompatibilities comprise the anthology’s materiality as negotiating a fusion of aesthetics, feelings-based subjectivity, intimacy and vulnerability. Troubling the ethics of a captured genre renders the paradoxical manoeuvres in writerly practices that hold up shared affective codes of belonging as baselines for agonistic literacies. The article theorises confessional writing as registers of predicaments and emotions whose constitutive contradictions bond writers and their audience to create feelings of intimacy and public.

Ground-plots of Invention: Poetics of the Material and Difficult Thinking in The Faerie Queene

This essay is concerned with allegory and thinking in The Faerie Queene. An enduring critical tradition interprets Spenser’s poem along oppositional lines—allegory/narrative, ideal/material—casting allegory as a violent form of classification and reification, intent on suppressing the contradictions on which it depends. With and against this tradition, I approach Spenser’s ‘continued allegory’ as a mode of narrative figuration that is characterized instead by the mutual conditioning and reciprocal interplay of its poles; a poetics of the material that is a poetics of mediation. I offer new readings of three well-known gardens—the Bower of Bliss, the Temple of Venus, and the Garden of Adonis—showing how they provide especially rich expressions of the entanglement of and movement between concept and experience. The first two facilitate sustained critiques of the unyielding abstractions so capably supplied by their martial visitors, who damagingly abjure the difficulties of thinking and experience. The third, the Garden of Adonis, exhibits and invites a different kind of thinking—both critical and speculative—in the form of arboreal “inclination.” Neither entirely abstract nor intuitive, “inclination” affords an uncertain, expectant, moving concept, which refuses the suppression of its constitutive contradictions (the violence with which we are so familiar), and evokes, instead, the hope for a possible solidarity between them. [N.R.]

Borderland Brothers: Austrofascist Competition and Cooperation with National Socialists, 1936–1938

From 1936 to 1938, the Austrofascist Ständestaat and the Nazi German Third Reich increasingly quarreled over the question of unification. Paradoxically, Austrofascists founded their arguments for autonomy from Germany by claiming Austrians were Germans, albeit of a regional variety: southeastern, Catholic, and Alpine as opposed to northern, Protestant, and Prussian. Austrian right-wingers founded their own German nationalism on competing regional identities, a constitutive contradiction that brought together right-wing agents across the Austro-Bavarian border into fraternal solidarity. But it also instigated fratricidal violence over the "right" way to be German. The result was a perception of two German brother peoples living in two German states, each with an Austrian-born leader. This article traces how, from 1936 until the annexation, these regimes engaged with each other in two senses of the verb: as opponents in a Bruderkampf and as friends in fascist Germanic cooperation. They even embarked on official joint projects of ethnonationalism amid an unofficial war, resulting in an intra-national borderland as chaotic as any international space in twentieth-century Europe.

Mormonicity

Mormonicity

Radical conservatism and circumstantial multiculturalism: Jews, Christians and Muslims in a French Catholic School in Israel

ABSTRACT The French Saint-Joseph school in Jaffa is one of the few educational institutions in Israel that have survived, since 1882, three political regimes without relinquishing pedagogical or managerial autonomy. This article examines the emergence of circumstantial multiculturalism in the midst of radical political changes in a colonial-international school. Since 1948, the school has been founded on three constitutive contradictions: a Catholic school with a majority of Muslim and Jewish students; a French school whose vast majority of pupils are not native French speakers; and a colonial school designed to serve the French metropole and the interests of the Catholic Church, but which has been catering for the changing local elites. We show how the school produces a conservative pedagogical space that preserves religious and cultural recognition through a policy of de-politicization. The combination of pedagogical conservatism and pragmatic institutional pluralism posits a radical educational alternative to Israel’s public-school system and a political alternative to multicultural policy.

Not Built to Last: Military Occupation and Ruination under Settler Colonialism

This article explores the afterlife of a military base on the islands of Haida Gwaii, unceded territory of the Indigenous Haida Nation. Canadian Forces Station Masset was officially decommissioned in 1997, its buildings abandoned by Canada’s armed forces. The understanding of both Haida and their settler neighbors was thus that the army was gone, leaving only ruins and ambivalent affects in its wake. Yet the military had not actually left; rather, it remained in concealment, continuing to monitor the territory it had occupied. At work in this strange juxtaposition of absence and presence, I argue, is the deliberate production of a paradox, a constitutive contradiction that serves to reinforce the structures of settler domination even as it mitigates the visible presence of the forces of occupation. The affects of ruination engendered by the military’s departure, I contend, form part of these processes of settler concealment and deception.

The ghosts of progress: Contradictory materialities of the capitalist Golden Age

This theoretical contribution will examine the process of displacement of the constitutive contradictions of advanced capitalist societies from interior to exterior during the postwar era known as the ‘capitalist Golden Age’ (1945 to 1980). I ask the following question: what if this displacement is both an inherent and necessary process? In that case, the apparent stability or expansion gained in the core during this era was not only at the expense of externalized instability and destruction ‘elsewhere’; rather, this displacement was a precondition for growth in the centre. This has normative, political and methodological implications for current projects of socio-ecological transformation based on a proverbial Green New Deal. By examining theories of unequal ecological exchange and biophysically expanded versions of the labour process as developed by ecological anthropologists such as Hornborg or ecological economists such as Georgescu-Roegen, I will explore the possibility of understanding the material trajectory of advanced capitalism as a zero-sum game. This leads to a view of capitalist development in the 20th century where the accumulation process is no longer seen as progressive. To substantiate this argument, I will re-examine the energy flow patterns that sustained the growth of American capitalism during the Fordist period of accumulation, or so-called Golden Age of American capitalism. This revision of the American experience of growth from 1945 to 1980 can be considered a contribution to the wider study of the development of the dependence of capitalism on fossil fuels, or ‘fossil capital’.

Solid waste management practices and their meanings in ecologically conscious households

This paper describes the household waste management practices of self-described sustainable households, focusing on the intentional actions the members of these households take to reduce environmental harm. Data from qualitative interviews about household waste management practices related to the disposal of trash, “packaging”, and recycling are analyzed using a Marxist-feminist model of household production. For the households in this study, packaging is a powerful reminder of their collusion with capital, eliciting powerful and unexpected negative reactions in interviews. At the same time, practices that involve allowing organic matter to decompose in the backyard, leaving urine unflushed, or placing human feces in the clothes washing machine or bathtub elicited few negative reactions, and recycling made people feel happy. Packaging and waste are necessary in capitalism because of the spatial division of labor and production, part of the constitutive contradiction between social needs and private production. I show how a division of labor and production that is necessary for accumulation manifests itself in an inherent antagonism toward human well-being in a discussion of the exhaustion, frustration, and conflict generated for highly ecologically oriented parents who are just trying to do their best to live a sustainable life in capitalist society despite the limits to the efficacy of these efforts.

From automatic discourse analysis to the desire subject discourse

A análise de Discurso de Michel Pêcheux tem seu momento inaugural com o livro Analyse automatique du discours (AAD-69). Desde seu início, a noção de sujeito se faz presente como organizadora dos processos epistemológicos. Mas não se trata de qualquer noção de sujeito. Convoca-se uma noção de sujeito contingente, interpelado pela ideologia e barrado pelo inconsciente. Este artigo se propõe a acompanhar o surgimento dessa noção e cartografar seus aggiornamentos em relação à teoria. De um lugar descritivo do sujeito do inconsciente, propomos que o barramento ideológico produz resistência pulsional que, em última instância, provoca e permite a desidentificação ideológica. O artigo se divide em três momentos. No primeiro, retomamos a constituição teórica da AD, revisitando brevemente suas fases e seus construtos para compreender como a Psicanálise vai aparecendo no deslocamento da teoria de Pêcheux. Em um segundo tempo, trazemos para a discussão o texto Só há causa daquilo que falha (PÊCHEUX, 1978), em que Pêcheux retifica posições anteriores e enfatiza o valor teórico, político e histórico da falha, evidenciando, com isso, o liame com a presença da Psicanálise em relação ao sujeito. Por fim, concluímos apontando para uma ampliação da análise que vá além das recorrências e que vise também à interpretação das políticas de resistência do sujeito, a partir do aporte da Psicanálise, para que se possa compreender o discurso na sua contradição constitutiva do mesmo e do diferente, em seu duplo plano, o da ideologia e o do inconsciente.

On no man’s (Is)land: futurities at the border

ABSTRACTFocusing on communities that, displaced by riverbank erosion, relocate to the islands formed by silt sedimentation in the middle of the Ganga, along the stretch of the river that coincides with the international border between Bangladesh and India, this paper examines the constitutive contradictions of citizenship and alienness. Analyzing Sourav Sarangi’s documentary …Moddhikhane Char(aka No Man’s Island, 2012) along with its conditions of production, the paper isolates an aesthetic of precarity that enables the filmmaker to challenge a statist spectacle of border control while participating in a global documentary humanitarianism. The paper also engages in more speculative contemplations on environmental shifts, the beleaguered status of the common, and the futures of frontier communities. At stake is a nuanced understanding of emergent forms of political agency that subvert, and threaten to displace, classical paradigms of citizenship and political participation.

Wild and Scenic Wasteland: Conservation Politics in the Nuclear Wilderness

Abstract Nuclear weapons production has created a unique geography of irradiated open space in the United States. In recent years, many of these landscapes have been re-classified as national wildlife refuges in an attempt to transform the nation's atomic sacrifice zones into spaces of environmental salvation. However, these areas are also home to contaminated biota that migrate beyond refuge boundaries, inspiring biological vector control campaigns that frame nuclear nature as a threat that must be contained. How can these environments simultaneously embody ruin and redemption, and what work does this constitutive contradiction do? In this article, I explore the slippery subjectivities of nuclear waste and nature at Washington State's Hanford Nuclear Reservation. Beginning with the Hanford Reach National Monument, I examine how this space is framed as both pristine habitat and waste frontier. Next, I consider how Hanford's biological vector control program addresses the spread of radioactive flora and fauna. Looking specifically at one of the site's most notorious offenders (the fruit fly), I discuss how vector control uses instances of nuclear trespass to articulate the boundary between contaminated and uncontaminated. Finally, by examining the dual production of nature as both untouched wilderness and biological vector, I consider how this slippage between pure and polluted has been employed in the service of nuclear industry. I argue that in its doubling, nature is being recruited to do what the U.S. Department of Energy cannot: to solve Hanford's nuclear waste problem.

Displaying the Worldview of Japanese Fascism: The Tokyo Thought War Exhibition of 1938

ABSTRACT:This essay explores an imperial state exhibition held in Tokyo in 1938 and explains how the exhibition displayed a fascist worldview of historical crisis and national regeneration that was taking shape in Japan in the late 1930s. The exhibition – entitled the Thought War Exhibition (Shisōsen tenrankai) – was curated by the Japanese state's newly formed Cabinet Information Division (Naikaku jōhōbu) and held in Takashimaya Department Store in downtown Tokyo. Comprised of materials related to the Communist International, the Spanish Civil War, the national liberation struggle in China, and the communist and anticolonial movements inside the Japanese Empire, the Exhibition portrayed Japan's invasion of the Chinese mainland in 1937 as an extension of a global thought war against communism, requiring all imperial subjects to purify themselves of foreign influences and mobilize for national thought defense. While on the surface this Exhibition was an example of prewar state propaganda, it also expressed a fascist worldview that was coalescing in the Japanese state in the late 1930s. This essay investigates how this fascist worldview was exhibited in a sequence of displays, including dioramas, panoramas, illuminated maps, and display cases, and how these displays revealed constitutive contradictions that underwrote the formation of fascism in Japan.

Yes, There Is No Crisis. Working Towards the Posthumanities

There is widespread consensus in the Humanities scholarly community that it is inappropriate to speak of a “crisis” of our field, yet we do spend a disproportionate amount of time actually justifying or defending our existence to the public. I want to argue that this is a constitutive contradiction of the Humanities today and that it reflects not only public concern about our relevance, but also significant internal fractures within the Humanities. In this paper, I want to look more closely at some of these inner fractures. The Humanities can and will survive their present predicament and contradictions to the extent that they will show the ability and willingness to undergo a major process of transformation in response to both technological advances and geo-political developments.

Topografia, personagens marginais e identidade em letras de samba e de tango

<p>Nas letras de samba e de tango compostas entre as décadas de 1910 e 1940, notamos a reiterada presença de personagens marginais: o “malandro” e outros de seu universo, no caso do samba, e o “<em>compadrito</em>” e outros relacionados a ele nos tangos. Essa presença se plasma como uma contradição constitutiva, já que esses gêneros musicais, muitas vezes relacionados à representação do nacional, propagavam um modo de vida fora do apregoado como ideal de cidadão pelos respectivos Estados nacionais. É nosso objetivo neste artigo analisar como, nas composições nas quais aparece esse tipo de personagem, emergem embates entre vozes que identificamos, de um lado, como filiadas com a perspectiva marginal e, de outro, com posicionamentos relacionados às ações disciplinadoras dos Estados nacionais. Observaremos também como nessas letras a topografia representada se relaciona com questões de identidade desses personagens marginais, assim mesmo com questões de identidade nacional.</p><p><br /><em></em></p><p><br /><strong></strong></p>

Only Muslim: Embodying Islam in Twentieth-Century France by Naomi Davidson

Only Muslim: Embodying in Twentieth-Century by Naomi Davidson. Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 2012. xi, 299 pp. $25.95 US (paper). For more than two decades, French public discourse has cast a challenge to French secularism. Journalists and politicians have taken headscarves and halal meat, prayers in public streets and requests for women's-only swimming pool hours, evidence that recent immigrants to France, especially from North Africa, pose a new and visible threat to norms and laws that govern a religiously neutral public sphere. In these accounts, are seen to repeatedly physically transgress republic's cherished laicite. These corporeal transgressions are imagined to represent Muslims' inability to properly privatize their faith. Naomi Davidson's important book offers crucial historical insight into why body is focus of public debate about Islam. In doing so, it offers compelling correctives to standard narratives about problem in modern France. First, book suggests that these state concerns are not just a recent phenomenon. It shows that managing has a much longer colonial well postcolonial history. Secondly, by focusing on Muslims and Davidson questions the usefulness of laicite a category for understanding history of in France (p. 12). Standard accounts of laicite, in her view, fail to account for why bodies and embodied practices gamer so much state attention. In order to understand pervasive corporealization of Islam, she argues, one needs to attend to questions not just of religion, but also of race. Indeed, writes Davidson, Muslim must be understood as a category of racial rather than one of religious difference (p. 11). Muslim in state discourses and practices of what she terms Islam francais is simultaneously homogenizing and particularizing. It presumes that possess a unified culture that expresses itself in distinct material forms such architecture and food. In its materialized particularity, Muslimness of North African migrants resists assimilation into universal and presumptively disembodied abstraction of French citizenship. The racialization of religion that Davidson describes recalls fate of Jews and Judaism in post-revolutionary and colonial North Africa. Throughout book, Davidson productively draws out such parallels and divergences in order to clarify specific ways in which North Africans have been racialized. How did Islam francais produce Muslimness an embodied condition? In order to illustrate how state officials were concerned with bodies they were with souls, Davidson adopts a highly original phenomenological approach to state and colonial archive. Studying architectural plans of Mosques alongside official correspondence, Davidson reconstructs how officials conceived a built environment. She details how Islam francais assigned embodied practices (praying, eating; healing) to specific places and spaces. In process, she shows how state produced ideas about North African colonial migrants' prayer habits and hygiene, culinary and vestimentary practices. Since First World War, institutions that were created to at once serve and surveil Muslim migrants in metropole conceived their faith in material terms--as matters of architectural and aesthetic detail, bodily conditions, and embodied traditions. Rather than approaching Islam francais a coherent set of discourses and practices, Davidson's book explores constitutive contradictions that marked it from start. The first chapter lays out these founding contradictions by exploring how orientalist discourse, colonial Algerian law, and eventually anticolonial nationalism shaped conceptions of Islam: its connection to body and its presumptive confusion between public and private. …

A cultura de belezas americanas: gestão de pessoas, discurso e sujeito

O discurso organizacional parece incapaz de induzir comportamentos alinhados com as exigências e necessidades da empresa. A literatura sobre gestão de pessoas aponta essa dissociação entre discurso e prática como um paradoxo. Este artigo propõe ir além, ao considerar que ele é, na verdade, signo de uma contradição constitutiva do campo a partir da qual as ações gerenciais são produzidas. A não coincidência entre discurso e prática é a regra que propicia a regeneração e reiteração incessante do que é comunicado. Técnicas renovadas de treinamento mostram que a integração dos indivíduos é vista como um problema de aprendizagem, dependente do ensino de modos de sentir e perceber suas sensações e experiências, o que vai muito além da fronteira do discurso, apontando outros limites e antagonistas. Espera-se que os indivíduos sejam sujeitos de sua própria sujeição. Nessa perspectiva, a operação e o problema da gestão de pessoas residem na necessidade de produzir simultaneamente a completa sujeição e o sujeito pleno. Os referenciais teóricos do discurso organizacional e da teoria linguística fundamentam a crítica às práticas inovadoras de gestão de pessoas. Um dos personagens do filme Beleza americana ajuda a reordenar a reflexão anterior, propiciando a retomada do problema segundo a nova chave, com a passagem do discurso ao sujeito.

Yes, There is no Crisis. Working Towards the Posthumanities

There is widespread consensus in the Humanities scholarly community that it is inappropriate to speak of a “crisis” of our field, yet we do spend a disproportionate amount of time actually justifying or defending our existence to the public. I want to argue that this is a constitutive contradiction of the Humanities today and that it reflects not only public concern about our relevance, but also significant internal fractures within the Humanities. In this paper, I want to look more closely at some of these inner fractures. The Humanities can and will survive their present predicament and contradictions to the extent that they will show the ability and willingness to undergo a major process of transformation in response to both technological advances and geo-political developments.

The Rise of Neoliberal Feminism

In this paper, I argue that we are currently witnessing the emergence of neoliberal feminism in the USA, which is most clearly articulated in two highly publicized and widely read ‘feminist manifestos’: Sheryl Sandberg's Lean In (a New York Times best-seller) and Anne-Marie Slaughter's ‘Why Women Still Can't Have It All’ (the most widely read piece in the history of the Atlantic). Concentrating on the shifting discursive registers in Lean In, I propose that the book can give us insight into the ways in which the husk of liberalism is being mobilized to spawn a neoliberal feminism as well as a new feminist subject. This feminist subject accepts full responsibility for her own well-being and self-care, which is increasingly predicated on crafting a felicitous work–family balance based on a cost-benefit calculus. I further pose the question of why neoliberalism has spawned a feminist rather than a female subject. Why, in other words, is there any need for the production of a neoliberal feminism, which draws attention to a specific kind of inequality and engenders a particularly feminist subject? While this new form of feminism can certainly be understood as yet another domain neoliberalism has colonized by producing its own variant, I suggest that it simultaneously serves a particular cultural purpose: it hollows out the potential of mainstream liberal feminism to underscore the constitutive contradictions of liberal democracy, and in this way further entrenches neoliberal rationality and an imperialist logic. Indeed, neoliberal feminism may be the latest discursive modality to (re)produce the USA as the bastion of progressive liberal democracy. Rather than deflecting internal criticism by shining the spotlight of oppressive practices onto other countries while overtly showcasing its enlightened superiority, this discursive formation actually generates its own internal critique of the USA. Yet, it simultaneously inscribes and circumscribes the permissible parameters of that very same critique.

The Function of Agon at the Present Time

The Function of Agon at the Present Time Peter Hitchcock Our antagonist is our helper. Edmund Burke In this essay I want to take up the important principle of agon in relation to how we conceptualize world literature and articulate a literary criticism adequate to it. I am particularly concerned to reconfigure the appropriateness of scale to such endeavor in part because scale can reveal the parameters of world literature at its most agonistic. Yet I also want to frame such discussion with a reconsideration of the function of criticism itself whose own logics of engagement are clearly at stake in world literature's reemergence. This is not in the service of reinventing a nineteenth- century argument for a twenty- first century practice but as a way to measure the forms of crisis that give to criticism its urgency and possibilities. When Matthew Arnold uses the above quote from Burke as an epigraph to Essays in Criticism (of which "The Function of Criticism at the Present Time" is a part) he marks the value of disputation to criticism's renewal (a familiar strategy to be sure, but not one without implications for our present). If we can accept this as a matter of course in contemporary critique the nature of antagonism itself has changed dramatically. Indeed, literary criticism is often hamstrung by the scale of antagonism it perceives so that, for instance, even when the "world" is invoked, it appears substantially smaller or meager in contrast to its generic correlatives. Perhaps this is always the case but the logic of disjunction redraws the field of agon in which both the literary and its criticism carve out the specificity of their difference. If agon is criticism's charge then scale is a useful heuristic in its activity especially, but not solely, when something as seemingly capacious as world literature is at stake. Why scale is important to figure as agon addresses one of the constant challenges facing literary criticism: the question of its relevance. It is not that critics of various persuasions are unable to produce a vibrant knowledge of the literary within cultural discourses, but that the social insists critique must engage with more than itself in its procedures or risk a marginal status as somehow hermetic or narcissistic. The call for relevance is not consistent but refracts historically specific crises that cannot but help interpellate intellectual endeavors in their sway. There is no space here to recount all of the ways in which literary criticism is currently subject to crisis but they obviously include: a deepening institutional instability in [End Page 5] the status of the humanities as a pivot in learning; changes in the technology and logic of the publishing industry; the relationship of the literary to other modes of cultural expression; the status of theory for cultural interpretation; and the inevitable impress of commodification within the intense contemporary dynamics of globalization (all of which can be used as a rationale for world literature). If, for Matthew Arnold in the essay from which I have adapted my title, disinterestedness was the answer to those who desired a certain embeddedness and relevance in literary criticism, especially regarding politics and society, today any whiff of disinterestedness would itself constitute a crisis for a specialization chasing the tail of professionalism and institutional credibility. Clearly, the logic of this challenge cannot be averted, but it can be embraced as part of criticism's potential not just to explain crisis but, by working on its constitutive contradictions, to make it, to participate in the challenge it represents. We think of characters within a narrative as being classically caught within a structure of agon, but this can be read as a provocative trope for criticism's relationship to the literary and its broader relevance (keeping in mind that relevance here is not an accusation but a material substance of socialization). Such "relevance" is particularly prominent in the re- emergence of world literature, whose scale forms the fulcrum in my comments below. Agon is not a substitute for Arnold's sense of criticism but is coeval with its social charge. It is not a function of critical intent as such, but draws attention to the...