Forms Of Collective Agency Research Articles

Collective Disruptions of Bare Life in Marcela Zamora's Maria en tierra de nadie

Women, children, youth, and Indigenous groups have been the most affected by the ongoing violence in Central America. In this article I discuss ways in which migrant women take action against precarity and exploitation through their testimonial accounts in Marcela Zamora's documentary film María en tierra de nadie (2011). The women in the film tell their stories of betrayal and abduction, while others discuss their search for their disappeared children. My aim is to contribute to the ongoing debate on precarity, agency, and migration through the analysis of credence as a form of collective agency that disrupts the forces behind precarity and bare life.

Agency and Legal Responsibility: Epistemic and Moral Considerations

¿Qué tipo de agencia es necesaria para la personalidad jurídica? ¿Cuáles son los requisitos cognitivos y racionales que los sistemas legales asumen acerca de los sujetos de la ley? ¿Cómo es que los seres humanos cumplen con estos requisitos? En trabajo previo (Cáceres y Montemayor, 2016), hemos argumentado que estas preguntas requieren un nuevo acercamiento a la teoría del derecho, basado en hallazgos recientes en ciencia cognitiva, que van más allá de tratamientos teóricos neuro-legales contemporáneos. Aquí construimos sobre esta propuesta, ahora enfocándonos en cuestiones de agencia y normatividad, incluyendo tipos de agencia que son relevantes para la epistemología social. La conclusión principal del artículo es que los muy estrictos requisitos cognitivos que se asumen sobre las capacidades explícitas de racionalidad de los agentes cognitivos, presupuestos por la ley, no sólo son incompatibles con los hallazgos en psicología, sino que un análisis sistemático de la agencia moral y epistémica también es necesario para poder entender la normatividad legal. El argumento principal es que tipos de agencia colectiva, moral y epistémica, difieren de la agencia individual, la cual también debe distinguirse como moral y epistémica. Fundamentalmente, la agencia colectiva difiere de la individual no sólo con base en diferencias con respecto a la racionalidad, sino también con base en los criterios de integración informativa. Varias consecuencias de este análisis son evaluadas, incluyendo aspectos concernientes a integración informativa para juicios y decisiones, comunicación fiable para la agencia epistémica, y la integración de consideraciones morales en el razonamiento jurídico. Una revisión comprensiva de la noción de “autonomía” es justificada por esta propuesta, en parte porque los requisitos comunes para la personalidad y autonomía jurídica son muy demandantes e inadecuados en muchos casos, y en parte porque la agencia colectiva debe tomarse en consideración como un tipo fundamental de agencia legal responsable para procesos de integración informativa. Basándonos en la distinción entre formas epistémicas y morales de razonamiento, explicamos cómo los sistemas legales necesitan de altos niveles de integración cognitiva para la responsabilidad legal a nivel colectivo.

Queer Sonorities: Sound as Persuasion in Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons

ABSTRACTThis essay considers the feminist implications of Gertrude Stein’s sonic devices in the extended prose poem Tender Buttons, a study in persuasive sound that avoids the foreclosures of semantics and grammar through the ephemerality of sound. Situating domestic space and its conversational tones as the sonic context in which Stein produced her work, I explore how she offers collaborative, embodied, and playful communicative strategies that encourage the reader to hear and speak the sounds of her domestic experiences. In Stein’s prose, vocal readers exceed the impositions of written text through performance and linguistic sonorities enabling the sounds of words (as opposed to their meanings) to slip away from static positions. Readers are encouraged to participate in the process of making meaning, to both sound out and listen to the words on the printed page. Stein’s sound writing, in other words, resonates with feminist communication theories that foreground listening, collaboration, experiential knowledge, and forms of collective agency.

Eyes Wide Open: The Look of Obstinacy, the Gaze of the Camera, and the 24/7 Economy in Antja Ehmann and Harun Farocki’s Labour in a Single Shot (2011-2015)

Moving beyond Jonathan Crary's ontologically framed subject in his essay 24/7, the following essay calls on Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge's political economy of labor power in order to query the persistence of obstinacy within the neoliberal economy of 24/7. Tested against Harun Farocki's final film project coproduced with his wife Antje Ehmann, Labour in a Single Shot, the essay argues that neoliberalism has in fact generated both tools and forms of collective agency that together call Crary's cultural pessimism into question.

Réflexions sur la formation de la classe ouvrière, le passé et le présent

Partly in response to fundamental changes which have occurred in the social relations of actually existing capitalism, and to the concomitant political upheavals, partly as a result of the related debates and transformations in social and cultural theory, several social historians of the 1970s and 1980s began to rethink their ideas about class. Having previously made a powerful contribution to the history of working-class formation, the historians in question began to advocate the necessity of a decisive break with Marxist and other materialist sociologies, by way of a turn to various forms of cultural and linguistic analysis (“the discursive approach to history”). By the end of the 1990s, forms of consensus had coalesced around this so-called cultural turn, stressing the complex and contingent relationship between a society’s forms of collective agency and identification (such as “class”) and its structural circumstances and characteristics (such as the organization of work and the distribution of inequality). During the first two-thirds of the 20th century, distinctive political traditions of the Left had developed around the given processes of capital development and their associated social histories, acquiring strong and long-lasting shape after 1945. Since the 1970s however, as capitalist restructuring under neoliberal auspices inexorably remade the social worlds of class, those earlier patterns of politics also ceased to work. In the light of the fundamentally different patterns of working-class formation, the terms of Left political practice consequently need to be radically rethought.

"It Seems a Lot Like Play-Acting: Child Slavery, Global Solidarity, and Cosmopolitan Agency"

The growing power of multinational corporations in a globalized world is shifting the power relations between state, economy and civil society. Where states lose power, a common argument runs, a democratising empowerment of civil society compensates. This argument, however, rests on the assumption that civil society groups are able to act as representatives of citizens and thus function as cites for a representative form of collective agency. Discourse analyses of online debates concerning child labor and slavery testify to a social imaginary, which is devoid of any kind of collective, cosmopolitan agency and filled with doubt and uncertainty. The publics studied perceive of their global agency as individual, strictly economic, and weak at that.

The Blues Matrix: Cultural Discourses and Community in Erna Brodber's Louisiana

In this essay, Meriwether argues that Erna Brodber's representation of Vodou, spiritism, and music in her novel Louisiana illuminates a shared praxis among Afro-diasporic subjects that forms the basis of their viable political community. Using Houston A. Baker Jr.'s theory of the blues matrix and Homi K. Bhabha's theory of culture as enunciation rather than epistemology, Meriwether contends that Brodber's community comes into effect through various cultural discourses, and that these discourses illuminate a novel form of collective agency that is radically different from Westernized notions of community.