Late Capitalist Society Research Articles

Adorno’s dynamic theory of ideology

ABSTRACT Adorno’s conception of ideology was denounced by Habermas as incompatible with a viable form of social critique. By conflating ideology and the ‘identity principle’ inherent to modern Western reason, he argues, Adorno offered an overly negative characterisation of modernity and failed to recognise its rational potential. This paper questions this line of criticism by revisiting Adorno’s position. While he does sometimes associate ideology with identity-thinking, this association does not exhaust his views on the subject. For Adorno, ideology is just as much a matter of Identität as a matter of Schein, or illusion, and its practical effects. Moreover, he views ideology as an intrinsically dynamic concept, whose definition has changed throughout human history. Drawing on his late sociological writings, I distinguish three major stages in the development of the concept of ideology, namely (a) ideology as simple illusion, a definition associated with the Enlightenment and expanded by the so-called sociology of knowledge; (b) ideology as necessary illusion, invoked by Marx to capture the structural logic of capitalism; and (c) ideology as disillusionment, related to the positivism of late capitalist society. Finally, I reflect on what this survey reveals about the relationship between illusion and identity in Adorno’s theory of ideology.

Fragmented Life: "Death of the Subject" in Slaughterhouse-Five

Kurt Vonneguts Slaughterhouse-Five is a quintessential American postmodernist novel. Based on Fredric Jamesons postmodern cultural theories, the text will analyze the characteristic of death of the subject. With the development of capitalism, the religion gradually lost its absolute voice in society and was replaced by extreme individualism. However, after the devastation of the two world wars, people finally realized the dangers of individualism, and the status of the subject went into extinction. In the late capitalist society, Billy Pilgrim, the main character, was hard to gain a sense of belonging from the heroism and wealth, and gradually lost the subjectivity captured from the religion. Facing the crisis of death of the subject, Billy had tried to save himself by pastiche, but he failed in the end. By telling Billys personal experience, the novel not only amply demonstrates the spiritual dilemmas prevalent in post-war society but also expresses profound humanistic concern.

Bergson and Durational Performance: (Re)Ma(r)king Time

In his text, Bergson and Durational Performance, author James Layton, through his unyielding, embodied-intellectual engagement with the philosophical, psychological, and sociological realms of the durational performances he participated in, forces his reader to slow down. Permitting the flow of thought to flourish, as a reader I embraced involuntary memory, pondered truth, and took breaks without feelings of guilt. More than “respite from a socially accelerated culture” (p130), reading at this revised pace enabled me to reflect on how I can achieve an “increased ownership of selfhood in a late-capitalist society which champions the participation of everyone and marginalizes those who are less fearful of being left behind” (p249).

Monstrous Mushrooms, Toxic Love and Queer Utopias in Jenny Hval's Paradise Rot

Embarking on a close reading of Jenny Hval's 2018 novel, Paradise Rot, this paper sets out to unveil the utopic potential rooted in reimagining the body not as a self-contained being but as an intricate network extending beyond the confines of the skin. It challenges prevailing Western epistemologies that isolate humans, hierarchically distancing them from non-humans such as plants and animals. By taking up the literary conventions of gothic horror, the analysis focuses on the peculiar, co-dependent relationship of Paradise Rot's central characters: Carral and Johanna. As the women’s unsettling love affair unfolds, they become a symbiotic and mycorrhizal entity akin to the sprouting mushrooms inhabiting their dilapidated house. Exploring the metaphorical and tangible challenges posed by mushrooms, the paper underscores the interconnected, non-singular nature of fungal networks. Hval provocatively links the queerness of her main characters with fungi, both typically demonized as alien, contaminating, and freakish. This paper furthermore aligns these characteristics with queered figures from classic gothic horror, including the lesbian vampire and Susan Stryker’s transgendered Frankenstein. Together, these monstrous entities disturb the boundaries between the “natural” and the supernatural, the human and the non-human, the living and the dead. Marxists have drawn comparisons between the vampire’s parasitic need to feed on blood and capitalism’s exploitation of labor. Through the character of Carral, who I read as a femme vamp figure, I argue that vampires have redemptive qualities that illuminate our fundamental dependence on others to survive. Hval's novel illustrates the essential, confronting fact that we need one another, and more so than ever in precarious times. In the context of the climate crisis, neoliberal individualism, and ongoing economic instability, understanding our indebtedness to one another and our environments is crucial for planetary survival. Ties of care in late capitalist societies are complex, messy, and unequal, yet by recognizing our reliance on one another, we might, as scholar Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (2018) argues, realize a utopia where one’s dependence on others cannot, and need not, be concealed.

Self-realizing a lived existence in service of emancipation: Tsenay Serequeberhan’s activist hermeneutics

Through his own activistic hermeneutics, Sereque­ berhan crafts a philosophy which allows African(a) persons pathways to self­-realization and self­-eman­cipation from Western cultural imperialism. He does this through a unique reading of Heidegger to arrive at a hermeneutics of existence, and through Gadamer to posit a specific historicity which he calls ‘our heritage’. This article first charts how Serequeberhan articulates these concepts, and then explores their prescriptive, activist intent. The upshot of this is a stronger appreciation of Serequeberhan’s work and how it provides a fresh approach through which we can better understand existence in a globalized, post­colonial, late capitalist society. For Western readers especially, it offers a framework to better describe the relationship between, the self, others, and the historical interactions between them in a world fraught with enclosure and harmful ideologies.

COMMODIFICATION OF HUMAN EMOTION AND MARRIAGE IN CAPITALISM (A READING OF PROBST’S THE MARRIAGE BARGAIN FROM A MARXIST PERSPECTIVE)

This research aims to analyze Jennifer Probst’s The Marriage Bargain from a Marxist perspective to examine how social institutions like marriage and human emotions are commodified in the era of late capitalism. The novel deals with the theme of love, romance and marriage, but also highlights the commodification of marriage in a capitalist society. The two main characters, Alexandria and Nicholas, use marriage as a means to solve their economic problems, challenging the traditional notion of marriage as a bonding of two souls. This research aims to explore this phenomenon. This qualitative study employs a Marxist literary analysis of the novel, focusing on the commodification of marriage and human emotions in the late capitalist society. It examines how the novel’s characters challenge the traditional concept of marriage and use it as a commodity to satisfy their material needs. The core finding of this research is that under the harsh economic pressures of late capitalism, human emotions and social institutions like marriage are commodified, and people compromise their ideals for economic gain. The novel shows how marriage is used as a commodity to solve economic problems, and how the traditional concept of marriage is being challenged by the utilitarian values of modern societies. The research concludes that The Marriage Bargain is an illustrative example of the commodification of marriage and human emotions in late capitalism. The exploration of this discourse clarifies how the institution of marriage is being used as a commodity to satisfy material needs. The novel raises an uncommon issue regarding the marital relationship, and the utilitarian attitude of its characters towards their own marriage represents the emerging social problem of the reification of human relationships.

Diasporic Dysphoria: Decoding Affective Detachment in Disgrace and Severance

This paper is a comparative reading of J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace (1999) and Ling Ma's Severance (2018), analysing their shared affective mood of detachment, which I will call “diasporic dysphoria”. In these works, I propose that this dispassionate mood depicts both protagonists as diasporic citizens of their postcolonial and late capitalist societies. Coetzee and Ma use the affective mood of diasporic dysphoria as a form of representation in these novels, to represent historical and contemporary contexts through the alienation of labour, the countryside and the city through a visitorial aestheticisation, and unspeakable topics through metaphors and allusions. The purpose of this essay is to decipher and define this particular mood—one of historical alienation, distanced spectatorship, and the difficulty of articulation—through close readings, examining how diasporic dysphoria manifests thematically, structurally and linguistically in both novels.

Culture and law in the theoretical and methodological foundations of the study of social progress by domestic Marxists in the XXI century

In the present paper from the positions of dialectical method and comparative-historical analysis the problem of culture and law in relation to social progress and its study by modern domestic Marxists is considered. The authors prove that the study of social transformations at the level of theoretical generalizations or specific conditions of development of systems of social relations by modern authors is based on the original ideas of historians and philosophers of the 1960s. The paper focuses on the analysis of the interaction between culture and law in the spatial and temporal dimensions. Particular attention in the article is paid to methodological contradictions in approaches when analyzing social progress in the society of "real" socialism. The authors consistently prove why the conclusions of representatives of the neo-Marxist school of T. Adorno and H. Marcuse about the forms of human alienation of late capitalist society cannot be considered fair to societies at the legal level that deny private property. According to the conclusions of the article, culture and law in the idea of social progress in the theory of modern domestic Marxists develop on two levels. The first level is characterized by theoretical rethinking of the category of socio-economic formation and statement of social progress in the analysis of large historical epochs. The second level focuses on the development of Marx's humanistic ideas, which are based on the principle of identifying social progress with man's acquisition of full freedom.

Slowdown. Una questione di classe?

What does it mean to slow down and who can do it? In recent years, the need to decelerate to avoid environmental and social catastrophes has been evoked more and more often. The world runs too fast, we are now unable to act thoughtfully and really enjoy our life, which always flows at greater speed. And yet, we continually dream of slowing down, of rediscovering more authentic, everyday relationships. We dedicate ourselves to new hobbies, we learn to work with our hands, we plant vegetables on the terrace, we allow ourselves small and short holidays as a moment in which we believe we have regained possession of our existence. But today time has become a privilege and not everyone is allowed to use it. Having time is often a luxury, in the face of thousands of workers who can never slow down. Using the pandemic as the central moment of a suspension of time, we would like to explain what it means to slow down in late capitalist societies and why it is increasingly a question of class. Our slowness, in fact, is always related to the time taken away from someone else.

Vulnerability and Masculinist Notions of Control in Late Capitalist Societies

Vulnerability and Masculinist Notions of Control in Late Capitalist Societies

On the persistence of fear in late capitalism: insights from modernisation theories and affect theories

For decades, sociologists have characterised fear as the predominant emotion of late-capitalist societies. How can this be explained? Which determinants underlie the continuing relevance of fear? To answer this question, I draw on insights from modernisation theories and affect theories, which I see as complementing and extending each other. I argue that the former provide a ‘structural approach to fear’, focusing on fear-generating socioeconomic and cultural transformations, while the latter provide an ‘approach to fear’s affectivity’, focusing on the bodily and relational character of fear as well as its modulation by the current politics of fear. By combining these approaches, both the structural and affective dimensions of significant causes and effects of fear can be illuminated. This allows for the contouring of the late-capitalist ‘affect regime of fear’ using its structural and affective preconditions, which offers an expanded explanation for the persistence of fear in late-capitalist societies. Therefore, I will first introduce both approaches and outline their mutual extensions. Second, I will reconstruct and combine their insights regarding two significant fear-related phenomena, namely global risks and neoliberal lifestyles. Third, I will illustrate that these are preferentially processed through the affective politics of fear that reinforces politics of securitisation and politics of inequality. Finally, I will summarise the main features of the affect regime of fear and outline how the sociology of fear might benefit from bringing modernisation and affect theories’ approaches into dialogue.

A Critique of Philosophical Shamanism

A Critique of Philosophical Shamanism

Margaret Atwood'un Kalp Gidince Romanında Özgürlük ve Güvenlik İkilemi

Kalp Gidince, Amerika Birleşik Devletleri’nde geçen distopik bir romandır ve bankacılıktan üretime her sektörün çöktüğü bir toplum anlatılır. Kitapta, işsizlik, evsizlik ve şiddet istisnadan ziyade normu oluşturmaktadır. Hikaye evlerini ve işlerini kaybeden ve arabalarında yaşayan genç bir çift üzerinden anlatılır. Bu çift, artık sadece hayatta kalmaya çalışmakta ve güvenlik uğruna özgürlüklerinden vazgeçmektedir. Distopyalar yazıldığı dönemin korkularını ele alırlar. Romanda anlatılan toplum geç kapitalist bir toplumdur. Geç kapitalist toplumlar belirsizlik, güvensizlik ve kırılganlık üzerine kurulmuşlardır ve bunlardan kaynaklanan korku ve endişeyi sömürmektedir. Kalp Gidince romanı da bu sömürüyü yansıtmaktadır. Romanda kahramanlar güvenlik ve istikrar vaat eden bir projeye dahil olmakta, sonucunda özgürlüklerini kaybetmektedir. Çalışmanın ilk bölümünde distopya ve sosyal teori ilişkisi ele alınmıştır. İkinci bölümde romanın özeti ve bağlamı verilmiştir. Üçüncü bölümde geç kapitalist toplumların analizi akışkan modernlik tezi üzerinden yapılmıştır. Son bölümde özgürlük ve güvenlik arasındaki çelişkili ilişki ele alınmış ve bu çelişkili ilişki sonucunda ortaya çıkan tahakküm ilişkileri analiz edilmiştir. Çalışmanın temel tezi, korkuyu harekete geçiren ve sömüren toplum yapısının güvenlik ihtiyacını tetiklediği ve bu ihtiyacının özgürlük kaybına yol açacağıdır. Anahtar Kelimeler: Distopya, akışkan modernlik, geç kapitalizm, özgürlük-güvenlik ikilemi JEL Sınıflandırması: P1, Y92, Y80, F59

Transnational Proximity and Universality in Korean Culture: Analysis of Squid Game and BTS

By utilizing transnational proximity as a primary theoretical framework, I analyze the reasons why global audiences beyond Asia prefer contemporary Korean popular culture to other cultural products. I investigate several distinctive cultural programs and Korean screen spheres—BTS and Squid Game (2021) in particular—as well as fan communities. I mainly discuss whether "transnational proximity" based on similar socio-cultural experiences, including social inequality and social injustice, which are rampant in late capitalist society, works as a new theoretical frame in comprehending the global success of Hallyu. Finally, I discuss whether transnational proximity plays a pivotal role in determining the growth of local popular culture in the global cultural sphere.

Archival Silence in the Collections of Dietrich Schulz-Köhn

Archival Silence in the Collections of Dietrich Schulz-Köhn

Territorializing Whiteness

This paper provides an archaeological perspective on the Boy Scouts of America, placing special emphasis on Scout camps occupying Mohegan lands in southeastern Connecticut (USA) and focusing on the alteration of Indigenous and Indigenous-colonial sites. Archaeological traces demonstrate how Scouts modified a range of stone features, both ancient and recent, and how they reorganized and redefined the land by naming and bounding their camps. Considering these patterns alongside Scout material culture, including the archaeological remains of Scout habitations, we discuss Boy Scout simulations of Indigenous and Indigenous-colonial histories. Drawing upon Indigenous knowledge and critique, we explore how Boy Scout camps “territorialize” whiteness. This involves the appropriation of Indigeneity as a means of escaping the trappings of late capitalist society, the misrepresentation of Indigenous history via well-worn tropes of unilineal evolution (where things always progress from simple to complex) and the denial of colonial plurality and of continued Indigenous presence on the land.

“It’s not a very certain future”: Emotion and infrastructure change in an industrial town

Four decades on from the onset of deindustrialisation in the UK and other late-capitalist societies, industrial places are again emerging as key objects of policy discourse. Under the dual pressures of decarbonisation, and the recognition of ‘left behind’ regions as potential hotspots for feelings of political marginalisation, new strategies for clean growth are emerging, aiming to boost local economic and environmental performance. Presenting data produced via biographical interviews and deliberative workshops in Port Talbot, South Wales, we explore how experiences of life in one of the UK’s most significant manufacturing towns has shaped local feelings towards four place-based scenarios for industrial and energy systems decarbonisation. Drawing on the rich literatures detailing the cultural and emotional impacts of deindustrialisation, we illustrate how situated experiences of industrial dependence and decline shaped how Port Talbot residents made sense of visions for the town’s future. In so doing we show how, in the face of industrial decline, alternative aspects of place emerged as locus points of emotional and cultural identification, ‘public things’ (Honig, 2017) in which alternative hopes for the future are invested. As emergent policies for clean growth become enacted in concrete projects, we argue for a clearer focus on experiences of and relationships embedded in industrial places, to ensure such strategies meet the desires of local communities.

Fathers in Flux

Fathers in Flux Rey Chow (bio) and Markos Hadjioannou (bio) In his magisterial study The Metamorphoses of Kinship, the anthropologist Maurice Godelier offers a memorably vivid image for thinking about the way sexual and gender roles are routinely activated and lived across cultures. The way human beings perform their intimate relations, Godelier suggests, often resembles the way a ventriloquist's dummy "speaks"—that is to say, by channeling voices and behaviors whose sources are hidden from view, even as we believe that we are acting uniquely in accordance with our own identities, desires, and choices (314). In developing this idea, Godelier proposes a twofold metamorphosis that appears within kinship structures. On the one hand, he explains: Social realities that have nothing to do with kinship or sexuality—such as (shared or private) ownership of the land, succession to political and/ or religious offices, the existence of a dominant class or caste—make their way into kinship relations, install themselves and co-opt those relations into their service, into the service of their own reproduction. (313) This is to say, economic, political, religious, and hierarchy practices tend to metamorphose into attributes of the particular kinship relationships within which individuals are born, individuals who then entertain such practices in relation to their fathers, mothers, siblings, and so on. Put differently, familial ties are cultivated and lived in accordance with a larger social structure that hosts them but that typically remains out of sight. Importantly, though, kinship relations are further characterized by the particular biological attributes of the kinship members. Godelier stresses, for instance, that in certain social contexts, it is the son and not the daughter who will inherit the land, or the older sister and not [End Page 23] the younger sister who will take on the role of particular religious functions. It is precisely here that Godelier identifies the manifestation of a second metamorphosis, according to which "all of the attributes of kinship relations are ultimately redistributed among individuals according to their sex and their age, and are transformed into attributes of their person in accordance with their sex. Sex becomes gender" (313). Hidden within the personal attributes of the family members, in other words, are various social realities, which, though originally distinct from kinship, have become attached to, and are further reproduced as, family relations. These social realities are now enmeshed with roles defined by sexed bodies, through which these social realities start to prescribe— and reproduce—a socially specified set of differences between the sexes. Fatherhood, motherhood, siblinghood, and so on become gendered manifestations of the social relations that structure familial configurations, which in turn sustain and perpetuate these social relations. In sum, Godelier writes, "Kinship is the site where the individual's appropriation of society and society's of the individual is prepared and begins. It is first of all within kinship relations that each sexed body begins, at birth, to operate as a ventriloquist's dummy for its society" (314; emphasis added). This image of the ventriloquist's dummy is important not only because it conceptualizes sexuality and kinship explicitly in terms of performativity (it is an operation) but also because it underscores such performativity as inescapably collective and impersonal. Embedded in the dummy's moves and utterances are entire networks of social dependences, transactions, and negotiations. Furthermore, while the ventriloquist's dummy speaks in accordance with the societal forces that shape it, there is no essential or intrinsic link between these social forces and the sexed body as such: as Godelier demonstrates through his own ethnographic research into the Baruya, among other tribes, the connection is social, cultural, historical, and conventional, not natural. It is with an interest in this contingent connection that we turn, in this essay, to the changing features of the longstanding, global-popular figure of the father. If, as a kind of ventriloquist's dummy, the father has played a major role at the intersection of economies of (hetero)sexuality, biological reproduction, domestic organization, and cultivation of the young, what are some of the scenarios in which this role appears in late capitalist society around the world? Put differently, what kinds [End Page 24] of performances or operations does the father...

Smart Cities in the Global System of City-Regions: The French Regulation School’s Perspective

The study aims to analyse the rise of the smart city as part of the global trend of the rise of city-regions in late capitalist society. By using the methodology of the French Regulation School (FRS), the authors show that political and economic significance of smart city projects are based on their unique role in revamping the failing consumption characteristic of the ongoing crisis of the late capitalist, or as the FRS theorists call it, the post-Fordist regime of accumulation. Through the analysis of the smart city’s role in stimulating innovations and maintaining the consumption patterns needed for the continuing market growth, the present research postulates the hypothesis of the rise of the city-centred system of global developmental governance as a necessary move along the existing trajectory of transition toward the post-Fordist system of production and regulation. The authors argue that the worldwide rise of the smart city movement should be seen through the lens of stabilization of the late capitalist mode of development. A key shift in evolution of the existing global political and economic system is the formation of networked organizations that connect smart cities of the first, global, and the second, regional, echelon into a unified system of governance, which represents a new mode of regulation for the post-Fordist society.

Ghostly real estate: Haunting, debt and capitalist realism in Milan

Ghosts and analogous supernatural entities are pervasive cultural objects. Anthropologists have delved into the religious, social and cultural value of these presences in depth. However, the discipline does not seem to have dedicated enough energy to interpreting this phenomenon in late capitalist societies. Nevertheless, the relationship between ghosts and capitalism constitutes an object of great interest. The real estate sector seems to be particularly suited to investigating the logic of haunting in contemporary societies. Haunting, which gives rise to ghosts, is a compelling category for understanding power relations and economic brutality. Following Derrida, ghosts are relations that mediate different temporalities in the present. In the cases of the foreclosure I ethnographically observed in Milan, those peculiar relations are debt relationships. Judges and justice system actors who oversee the procedures, aware of the presence of ghosts, act in the awareness that this haunting can in no way be resolved, following a logic that Fisher has defined as ‘capitalist realism’.