Epochal Shift Research Articles

Western attitudes toward soldiers’ death: from the early modern period to the present

ABSTRACT The article provides a reconstruction of how western attitudes towards soldiers’ deaths have changed throughout history. By relying on the analytic lenses offered by Kantorowicz’ concept of ‘the king’s two bodies’, the narrative told in the present study develops through three main stages from the end of the fifteenth century until the present era. In particular, an age in which soldiers’ death was accepted as a socially meaningless cessation was followed by a period when death in war was regarded as a glorious sacrifice to end up with the sensitivity towards casualties typical of the current era. I shall refer to these epochal shifts as a transition from bare death to sacrificial death and, finally, to irrecoverable death. By offering a narrative of how the soldier has evolved from an expendable fighting tool into a precious individual, the article sheds light on some of the distinguishing traits of contemporary warfare.

Populist contestations: Cultural change and the competing languages of sexual and gender identity

There has been a vast proliferation of categories, descriptors and labels used to describe gender and sexual identity over the past few years, with terms now numbering in the hundreds. Many terms, such as heteroflexible, asexual, demigirl and sapiosexual actively contest masculine/feminine and hetero/homo binary arrangements of identity, and LGBTQ minority rights discourses and arguably represent an epochal shift in gender/sexual knowledge frameworks. The cultural conditions that make such change possible have yet to be explored. This paper draws on theoretical approaches to populism to analyse the role of popular culture, digital communication and contestation of institutional and expert knowledges in driving the emergence of new gender and sexual terminology.

Max Weber: From Modernity to Globality – a Personal Memoir

Lighting upon Weber as a history student in the late 1950s led to all round engagement with his work to the present day, beginning with rationality and bureaucracy, passing through appreciation of his synoptic vision of modernity, and arguing for the continuing relevance of his rationalization thesis. This emphasis on Weber’s contribution to understanding the course of modernity led in the 1990s to pointing out that his approach to epochal shift provides the basis for understanding the global age. The ever-developing nature of his thought can be further illustrated in his studies of China.

Towards (comparative) educational research for a finite future

ABSTRACTEducational scholars, particularly those working in comparative education, have largely failed to recognise, let alone discuss, the impending finite-ness of global resources. The field continues to operate on an assumption of infinite resources, an implicit cultural horizon in place since at least the Western Enlightenment. It has missed the epochal shift that is now upon us; unable to contribute to the deep transformation of research and practices that has now become urgent. Herein we discuss how such concerns might be addressed, suggesting an approach that centres ontological alterity through comparative method as means of making the turn towards a sustainable future.

De-westernization, democratization, disconnection: the emergence of Brazil’s post-diplomatic foreign policy

ABSTRACT For some time, foreign policy as an expression was perfectly interchangeable with diplomacy, given the degree of leverage enjoyed by diplomatic corps in Brazil's political system. However, there has arguably been some degree of discontinuity in this trajectory, which is noticeable from a couple of trends: Brazil's strategy toward Western powers vis-à-vis the rise of Asia,on the one hand, and democratization of foreign policymaking and the resulting tumultuous relationship between the foreign ministry and the presidency of the country, on the other. I posit that, from Fernando Henrique Cardoso to Jair Bolsonaro, this combination of factors prompted an epochal shift in Brazil's external relations, whose bottom line might be Itamaraty's demise as chief formulator while other governmental bureaucracies, political parties and individuals take over as the gravity centre, turning the contents of Brazil's foreign policy more responsive to social inputs, however less predictable and coherent over time.

Critical Lives: Herman Melville by Kevin Hayes

Reviewed by: Critical Lives: Herman Melville by Kevin Hayes Peter Riley Kevin Hayes Critical Lives: Herman Melville London, UK: Reaktion, 2017. x + 248 pp. In Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the Long Civil War (2015), Cody Marrs memorably describes the long career of Herman Melville as a historiographical "loose fish" that has often evaded conventional literary periodizations. Melville's transition and perceived decline, Marrs suggests, from prose to poetry in the 1850s and 1860s often maps a little too neatly onto the epochal shift between ante- and postbellum eras. In fact, this standard binary conception of the nineteenth century—often unable to think in terms of a "transbellum" American literary history—has had the effect of framing and reinforcing the later Melville as fundamentally out of place and time: a largely redundant antebellum figure who, left behind by the age, tragically turns inward towards the private solace offered by verse and coterie publication. Despite the many excellent facets of Kevin Hayes's new and eminently readable short biography, the Melville that emerges here does fall off something of a postbellum cliff. Hayes devotes a total of twenty-one pages to the last thirty years of Melville's life. This brevity has the effect of defying the critical trend that has lately seen Melville-as-poet come to the fore in fascinating and generative ways. What we get instead is Melville the "Modern Ossian," the familiar icon of frustrated authorship, who after reaching the heights of Moby-Dick suffers that ultimate ignominy of having to get a day job and who revives from his retirement torpor just enough to produce the final, transcendent Billy Budd. In other words, Hayes has produced a curiously uneven and diptych-like account of Melville's life that magnifies or diminishes the significance of particular events depending on where they are located on the graph of Melville's career trajectory. So, on the one hand, he is at pains to describe (at length) a game that early Melville might have played at high school and how, in "a vague and inchoate way," this pastime "gave Herman an inkling of the narrative possibilities of a chase" (29); on the other, he dismisses too quickly the late Melville's choice of tetrameter for Clarel as "reactionary" (170). This unevenness was no [End Page 103] doubt due in part to the restrictions imposed by the short biographical form and to our relative lack of information about Melville's later life, but still: those last thirty years—including the death of two sons and an epic poem—go by in what seems like the blink of an eye. That said, a few moments in the early chapters provide tantalizing glimpses of the later Melville's transbellum sensibility. It turns out that while writing "Bridegroom Dick" for inclusion in the 1888 John Marr and Other Sailors, Melville was thinking back to and celebrating his cousin Guert Gansevoort's role in the Mexican-American war. Such snapshots help secure a sense of continuity in an otherwise divided narrative design. This biographical narrative also attempts to revise perceptions of Melville's romantic attitudes. Hayes gives very little space to the homosocial or proto-queer Melville. At times refreshing, the absence can become distracting. Selecting a passage from a honeymooning Elizabeth Melville to her stepmother that describes the hotel they were staying at, Hayes enthuses, "[L]ook at the quality of Elizabeth's writing" and "[N]o wonder she fell for a writer and he for her" (80). The fact that their courtship correspondence does not survive is "a great loss to American literature" (80). Whereas this biography rehabilitates Melville's conjugal relations, it downplays the potential Hawthorne romance. It makes no mention of mournful Liverpool beaches or of the Agatha correspondence (or hand-squeezing or anything of Claggart's dark fascination with Billy, though we do take in the trip Hawthorne and Melville made to Chester). Melville's arrival at Nukahiva, on the other hand, receives a fair amount of attention, and Hayes makes sure to remind us of Tommo's abhorrence at witnessing the crew's landing: "Not the feeblest barrier was interposed between the unholy passions of the crew and their...

The Qualified Self: Social Media and the Accounting of Everyday Life by Lee Humphreys

Reviewed by: The Qualified Self: Social Media and the Accounting of Everyday Life by Lee Humphreys Hywel Dix (bio) Reviews 477 The Qualified Self: Social Media and the Accounting of Everyday Life Lee Humphreys MIT Press, 2018, 200 pp. ISBN 9780262037853, $30.00 hardcover. Much of the rapidly expanding research into the relationship between life writing and digital media has emphasized technological transformation and a corresponding epochal shift in how the self is constructed in different media over time. By contrast, one of the key arguments made by this timely book is that the public representations of selfhood that we associate with platforms such as Twitter, Instagram, or YouTube are direct descendants of vernacular diary keeping, letter writing, and journaling in earlier periods. Anna Poletti and Julie Rak's Identity Technologies: Constructing the Self Online (2014) is a collection of essays that brings together life writing and new media studies with a largely contemporary focus. Taking a complementary approach, Humphreys in The Qualified Self looks in two directions at once: both back at the kinds of life writing that emerged as a result of earlier technological forms, and forward into the varieties of self-representation made possible by social media in the present. For this reason, the book usefully supplements other accounts that overly fetishize the transformative potential of new technologies, and it has immediately become an essential addition to the existing critical literature on digital life writing. The Qualified Self: Social Media and the Accounting of Everyday Life starts off by defining three key terms: account, accounting, and accountability. Humphreys prefers the term account to other concepts that have previously dominated the field such as narrative, testimony, or bearing witness because she suggests that an account is inherently tied to identity in a way that mediates between online and offline performances of selfhood, and between individual and collective affiliation. An account, in other words, implies a subject in process. In keeping with her overall emphasis on how the traces of selfhood expressed in contemporary social media correspond to earlier media practices of which they are in fact the descendants, she suggests that the writing of names and addresses in diaries, scrapbooks, and photograph albums in an earlier period were tantamount to the creation of particular forms of account that now exist in digital form. Accounting is then the name for the process of compiling lots of different media accounts, and by doing so documenting, chronicling, and cataloguing diverse kinds of experience. Accountability is the term she uses to inject a degree of ethical consideration into the process, since when we use social media we are "accountable to others for the traces we create . . . for the traces created about us by others" and "to others for the traces they create about themselves" (14). Chapter 2 examines the means by which everyday experiences are rendered normalizing and normative through sharing, which also has the effect of rendering them meaningful and hence imbues them with value and importance both for the person sharing and the community among whom the experience is shared. It situates social media accounting in the context of media rituals and routines more [End Page 477] broadly, concepts which are more anthropological in nature than the chapter overtly declares. Chapter 3 expands existing media research in the area of identity performance by arguing that the visual presentation of the self is a form of social interaction. This argument is situated in the context of technological change over the long term, and makes an explicit comparison between early Kodak photography and Instagram. Such an approach has the useful effect of debunking the myth that social media have created fundamentally new ways of performing identity by giving those media a substantial evolutionary prehistory. Chapter 4 is devoted to what Humphreys calls "remembrancing." In arguing that this is a practice employed by people to create media traces of momentous events, she suggests that creating accounts of such events can be seen as a means by which the process of remembering itself is highly mediated. Her discussion is again rooted in earlier forms of technology such as the hand-written diary or travel journal, and these are again usefully compared to more recent...

The End of the West and the Future of Us All

Abstract This paper asserts that we are currently experiencing an epochal shift equal to that which inaugurated modernity. If the Caribbean was central to the production of modernity and the subsequent dominance of the West, it is also central to the current epochal shift. By exploring two dimensions of this shift as experienced in Jamaica – the growing influence of China globally, and the challenge contemporary feminist and sexual activism are posing to gendered notions of racial respectability that had previously served as the backbone of nationalism – the paper reflects on how we are being required to imagine sovereignty in new terms. If we are, in fact, witnessing the death of the West, or at least the destabilisation of the dominant parameters of Western liberal governance, what can the space of the Caribbean, and particularly Jamaica, tell us about what sovereignty might mean now and into the future?

From the ‘Merino Revolution’ to the ‘Astronomy Revolution’: Land Alienation and Identity in Carnarvon, South Africa

The establishment of an astronomy reserve around the core site of the Square Kilometre Array radio telescope marks the beginning of an epochal shift away from commercial sheep farming in the upper Karoo. In this article, I reflect on the significance of this ‘astronomy revolution’ by exploring the ways in which land is central to dynamics of identification, shaping social hierarchies and development expectations. The article uses archival and ethnographic sources to explore the case of Carnarvon. It contextualises the current land-use change to astronomy in the social history of the town, addressing the set of events that marked an earlier epochal change: the transition from communal to commercial sheep farming, often called the ‘merino revolution’. The history of land alienation accompanying this earlier transition resurfaces in current claims lodged through the post-apartheid land restitution programme, which intersect in complex ways with the current land-use change to astronomy. The article identifies a central tension in the ‘astronomy revolution’, which undermines claims to redress local historical inequalities while promoting identification with a broader national and global development priority.

Zwischen „Nachhaltigkeit“ und „Anthropozän“. Neue Tendenzen in der Umweltgeschichte

While “sustainability” was the key term of environmental history during the last decades, the concept of the “Anthropocene”, borrowed from geology, has come to challenge the notion of an ecological equilibrium. Historians have begun to scrutinise how the irreversible shift to a new geological epoch is intertwined with social phenomena on many different levels from economic development to narratives of progress. In course of this debate, the question of how to overcome the nature-culture dichotomy, one of the central theoretical concerns of environmental history, has again provoked new interest. In the end, the current controversies crystallise around how the epochal environmental shift marked by the “Anthropocene” is judged and how the challenges that humanity is facing can be coped with.

Conceptualizing Activation Policies Targeted at Single Mothers: A Case Study of Australia and the United Kingdom

AbstractSingle parents are increasingly a target group for “activation” through new obligations to seek paid work or engage in education or training. Researchers commonly characterize new activation policies in terms of epochal shifts or unidirectional movements away from understanding single parents as “carers” or “mothers”. This characterization downplays the degree to which the postwar welfare state viewed single parents as potential workers and the degree to which contemporary reforms view them as carers. Based on historical research and drawing on Foucault’s concept of problematization and research on neoliberal governmentalities, pre-emptive politics and anticipatory modes of power, this article seeks to extend existing characterizations of activation policies for single parents.

Introduction

Introduction

Labyrinth and Rhizome: On the Work of Walid Raad

In The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Jean-François Lyotard posits that postmodernity’s skepticism towards modernist metanarration is key to understanding this epochal shift. Constructed continuities attempted to inform the individual’s orientation and modern society’s ability to make sense of its past, present, and future. These overarching “grand narrative[s]” presented themselves as institutionalized, universalist truth-claims.[1] Others, including Fredric Jameson, theorize that this loss of orientation and historicity has given way to a sort of pastiche, a collection of empty signifiers that no longer bear true relation to the past.

Human Moral Becoming and the Surrealist Imagination: Saulius Tomas Kondrotas and Šarūnas Sauka

The author of this article interprets the surrealist narratives of Saulius Tomas Kondrotas and Šarūnas Sauka as signs of both a crumbling empire and the rebirth of human dignity in late Soviet-era literature and art. A sense of epochal shift provides a common background of allegorical narration in both Kondrotas’s and Saukas’s narratives, protecting them from flat politicising and encouraging us to read their work as an encounter between the human and the eternal.Countering Soviet values, Kondrotas and Sauka place the universal rebellion of the artist against an ideology that imprisons the individual at the core of their work, making it possible to draw a connection to the imagination of the medieval alchemist, as they too concentrate their attention on the search for God and the resulting visions-projections.Kondrotas’s and Saukas’s works are characterised by oniric, surrealist stylistics, an understanding of the world as a dangerous place, and the human-godlike-animal matrix. The end of the world, the collapse of foundational hierarchies of values, and a feeling of moral ambivalence are common to both, leading them to search for solutions in response to human moral decline. Kondrotas and Sauka both speak about human rebirth, one of the oldest of human archetypes and one central to the alchemical imagination.

Epochality, Temporality and Media-Communication Ownership in Aotearoa-New Zealand

Amidst academic policy debates over the proposed Fairfax-NZME and Sky-Vodafone mergers, the historical patterns of media-communication ownership received little mention. The purpose of this article is to explain, firstly, how the very possibility of such mergers eventuated and, secondly, why associated epochal reconfigurations in the political economy of New Zealand capitalism eluded public depiction. Initially I examine the repercussions which arose from: the restructuring of Radio New Zealand and Television New Zealand into State-Owned Enterprises (1987); the arrival of TV3 (1989); the formation of pay-subscription Sky Television (1990); and the abolition of all legal restrictions on foreign media ownership (1991). Together these events signalled the hollowing out of New Zealand’s media-communication system and the unfolding ownership patterns of conglomeration, transnationalisation and financialisation. Behind this critical narrative, I explore how the simultaneous restructuring of the national political economy, mediated public life and the vocabulary of economics obfuscated the epochal shift that was taking place. An ongoing lack of public awareness about this shift has debilitated normatively-grounded critiques of the contemporary media landscape and the ownership patterns which came to prevail.

Consumption and teleoaffective formations: Consumer culture and commercial communications

This article considers the potential of a novel practice theoretical concept – teleoaffective formation – for the study of consumption. The concept builds on Schatzki’s social ontology of practice. Teleoaffective formations are configurations across multiple practices that enjoin those practices to common ends, ordering their affective engagements and offering general understandings through which participants make sense of the projects they pursue. This article argues that the approach affords consideration of large-scale configurations of practice and discourse and, therefore, enables re-engagement, from a practice theory perspective, with an earlier generation of concerns with consumer culture – including issues of cultural intermediation, consumption norms and the motivational structures of consumption. The distinctive features of the approach are illustrated through three successive teleoaffective formations that link the field of commercial communications (advertising, marketing, public relations, etc.) with consumer culture. The first – ‘consumer sovereignty’ – originates in the 1920s and 1930s and finds its fullest expression in the mid-20th century. The second – ‘emancipatory consumerism’ – emerged in the late 1960s and came to characterise late 20th-century consumer culture. These are briefly sketched. The third, which I propose to call ‘promotional sustainable consumption’, is a nascent formation of discourse and practice relating brands, sustainability and consumption. This formation is explored in more depth. The periodisation should not be understood in terms of epochal shifts but as an ongoing, recombinatory process. The three formations represent reconfigurations between heterogeneous elements, inter alia: general understandings, teleological orientations and affective engagements. Each successive formation informs novel understandings of the consumer and provides cultural resources for transformations in consumption norms. Each also provides resources for capitalist legitimation. The article concludes with a brief discussion of some theoretical and methodological implications of the approach.

Dangerous Politics: Risk, Vulnerability, and Penal Policy (Clarendon Studies in Criminology) H. Annison. Oxford: Oxford University Press (2015) 288pp. £65.00hb ISBN 9780198728603

Dangerous Politics: Risk, Vulnerability, and Penal Policy (Clarendon Studies in Criminology) H. Annison. Oxford: Oxford University Press (2015) 288pp. £65.00hb ISBN 9780198728603

The New Global Politics of Sovereign International Tax: Space, Time, and Why BEPS is Not the Final Frontier

International tax is undergoing an epochal shift, reminiscent of the genesis of the current bilateral state-centric network of diplomatic agreements in the 1920s. The paradigm of Westphalian tax sovereignty is being assailed by efficient corporate tax planning, resulting in considerable profit shifting and base stripping by multinational enterprise. The supply side of policy is engaged in a race to the bottom competition, and the demand side benefits from treaty shopping and elective residence. Tax is at the heart of the social contract, and the welfare state is having an existential moment. Current efforts coordinated through the G-20 and OECD are likely to produce mock compliance or outright failure. Observing the comparative experience of financial regulation through the Basel Accords employing the constructivist ontology of international relations, this paper argues for constitutional anti-majoritarian paternalism in national tax administrations, together with global tax governance supported and implemented by a transnational epistemic community insulated from democratic interference. Indeed, the problem of space and time occasioned by the current era of globalization portend significant policy coordination problems and distributive contests. In light of the application of globalization theory to a futurist frame, however, it is clear BEPS is not the final frontier for the imagination of sovereign tax.

Debate on the New Global Capitalism: Transnational Capitalist Class, Transnational State Apparatuses, and Global Crisis

ABSTRACTThe state-centrism and nation-state/inter-state framework that reifies and fetishizes the nation-state and informs much theorization and analysis of world politics, political economy, and class structure is ever more incongruent with twenty-first century world developments. An epochal shift is underway to a new phase in the on-going and open-ended evolution of world capitalism, global capitalism, characterized by the rise of truly transnational capital and the integration of every country into a new globalized system of production and finance, a transnational capitalist class as would be global ruling class, and transnational state apparatuses. The anomalies in traditional approaches demonstrate the need for a Kuhnian paradigm shift. Competition among capitals and international conflicts are endemic to the system yet competition takes on new forms in the age of globalization not necessarily expressed as national rivalry. Global capitalism is in crisis. The more enlightened strata of the transnational elite want stronger transnational state apparatuses in order to cement the rule of the transnational capitalist class, bring a measure of regulation and governance from above, and stabilize the crisis-ridden system. A global rebellion against the transnational capitalist class is underway but popular, working class, and leftist struggles face many challenges.

‚Komponist‘ und ‚Komponieren‘ im frühen Mittelalter zwischen Umbruch und Kontinuität

AbstractSince around 800 in Europe, new music has been constantly created to an ever increasing degree, so that the early 9th century has the character of an epochal shift in music history. The creation of new music, first of broadly liturgical chants, is testified, on the one hand, by manuscripts transmitting texts and melodies, and on the other hand by literary sources (chronicles, lives of saints, etc.) which speak of the production of new musical items. It has often been doubted whether these creative processes can be qualified as acts of ‘composing’ in the modern sense of the word. In this essay, however, the main question will be what can be learned by the existing sources, if one asks what kind of information they offer regarding an early-medieval attitude towards ‘composers’ of music and the nature of their activities. In addition, it seems that this discourse had its beginnings mainly in the 9th century, and that it retained certain traits, and remained faithful to a restricted number of ideas (such as questions of