Late Modern Culture Research Articles

Identity politics and the politics of difference: critical transformations in contemporary thought

This article explores the relationship between identity politics and the politics of difference, focusing especially on the tensions that characterise this relationship within progressive theories and political discourses, and on their implications. The development of the concepts of identity and difference, as well as their limits and possibilities, are examined in relation to several theorists: Slavoj Žižek, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva, Michel Foucault, Cornel West and Judith Butler. This is followed by a discussion of Fromm’s social psychology insofar as it anticipates the growing importance of the concepts of identity and difference within late modern culture, and insofar as it identifies a number of critical concerns around these concepts which remain relevant today.

Regarding the Pain of the Others. Do We Need Teleethics?

I borrow part of the title of my paper from Susan Sontag. In 2003, a year before her death, Susan Sontag published an essay entitled Regarding the Pain of Others. There she takes up the subject of the moral significance of presenting the views of war, violent human death exposed to the lenses of cameras. Her approach to the contemporary issue of mediatisation through the image of the sight of human suffering provokes a question: Do we need teleethics today, the ethics of remote moral relations? Using the method of comparative analysis in the area of cultural determinants of ethics, I draw attention to the contemporary challenges that the culture of late modernity imposes on the morality of everyday life. My thesis is this: The images of human suffering provided by the media reveal the imperfection of our morality. As moral subjects, we are not prepared to respond to the suffering of human beings absent from face-to-face relationships. So, we need teleethics. The paper is devoted to this issue.

The Society of Singularities: Reply to Four Critics

Abstract In this article, Andreas Reckwitz replies to the four critical commentaries of Patrick Baert, Andreas Pettenkofer, Austin Harrington and Sally Haslanger on his book The Society of Singularities. In this context, he discusses the general position of this book within the landscape of contemporary social theory and the question of what a ‘social logic of the unique’ means. He enters the question in how far his analysis of the new middle class differs from Pierre Bourdieu’s analysis of the new petty bourgeoisie, emphasizing the combination of an orientation towards inner experience and social prestige in his account of the new middle class. He discusses the question of whether neoliberalism is responsible for the proneness to disappointment which the late-modern culture of self-actualization implies. Finally, he works out the differences between the type of critical analytics which his book implies and normative critical theory.

Homo dissipans: Excess and Expenditure as Keys for Understanding the Borderline Condition?

This paper sheds light on some aspects of what contemporary clinical theory calls “borderline” condition providing a description of a key figure of late-modern culture that I will call Homo dissipans (from Latin dissipatio, -onis = scattering, dispersion). Homo dissipans is the opposite of Homo œconomicus, the form that “narcissism” takes on in contemporary “achievement society,” solely concerned with rational action aimed to utility and production. In order to define Homo dissipans, I follow French philosopher, anthropologist, and novelist Georges Bataille’s descriptions of two core phenomena: “excess” and “expenditure.” The former can be defined as a surplus of energy that according to Bataille characterizes human existence, animated by a general movement of exudation and dilapidation and an inexhaustible drive to “pour out” of oneself, especially outside the limits of composure and reasonableness. The latter is an ethical attitude which gives its approval to excess and to its metamorphic and destructive power. The Homo dissipans’ credo is to profitlessly dissipate the surplus of energy, escape into a world of pure intensities in which all forms – including identity – dissolve and surrender themselves to transformation. I argue that Bataille’s ideas about “dissipation” can help us reconsider two features attributed to borderline personality disorder which have been extensively described and sometimes stigmatized – “identity diffusion” and “stable instability” – and to better recognize, understand, and make sense of their phenomenology in the clinical context.

The Dispute about the Vision of Man in the Research and Didactic Activity of Prof. Zofia Józefa Zdybicka USAHJ: An Attempt to Reconstruct the Pedagogical Dimension of the Philosopher’s Life and Work as a Voice in the Discussion on the Issue of Conservative Pedagogy

The article is devoted to reconstruct the pedagogical dimension of the life and work of Zofia Józefa Zdybicka USAHJ. This is done by revealing the values that guided the researcher in her life, her commitment to work for the community, but above all by her contribution to reading the issue of the philosophical foundations of pedagogy, in particular the relationship between theses in the field of philosophical anthropology and the direction of educational practice. Hence, in the content of the article, elements of the biography and memories of the philosopher were recalled, showing her as a person devoted to the upbringing of young generations and a leading Polish Thomist associated with the academic community of the Faculty of Christian Philosophy of the Catholic University of Lublin, involved in disputes about the vision of man. The subject of the analysis is her research activity in two periods of modern Polish history: (1) when the communists were in power and (2) nowadays, when we see a strong influence of liberal currents on the intellectual formation of young people. We put forward the thesis that an attitude towards religion determined, and continues to determine, the axis of the dispute both in the times of the dominance of Marxist anthropology in pedagogy and in the vision of man, which is the backbone of the culture of late modernity. Is Zdybicka a conservative educator? You would have to ask the Professor about that. In the article, we indicate that a conservative value found in the philosopher’s works can be seen as her statements for the need to secure the spiritual and transcendent dimension of human existence in upbringing. Analyses in the article are based on several selected texts of the scholar, including Participation of being. Attempt to explain the relation between the world and God (1972); Person and Religion. An Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion (in Polish 1977; in English: New York 1991); Religion and The Religion Sciences (1988); God or Sacred? (2007); Atheism Trap (2012). The article consists of two parts. Part 1 presents the essence of the dispute about the vision of man from the perspective of Zdybicka’s metaphysical research on religion. Part 2 presents a comparison of the two models of humanism: theocentric (which the scholar supports) and anthropocentric (in the Marxist and postmodern version) in the context of the criticism of atheism that the scholar conducted when Marxism prevailed in Polish educational systems (Part 2.1) and after the political transformation in Poland since the 1990s (Part 2.2), when the possibility of changing anthropological foundations in education opened up.

Genre and gender at work: the antithesis of man from pictorial analysis in Portuguese advertisements

AbstractThis study presents a pictorial analysis of Portuguese advertisements from a visual semiotic perspective, particularly the symbolic attributive and suggestive processes. Aiming to elucidate the relationship between genre and gender, the study explored advertising genre, masculinity in advertisements, and the antithesis of man as primary theoretical concerns. The data consisted of five pictures from Portuguese advertisements. The analysis suggests that advertisements are a textual arena where not only genre but also gender is constructed and modified in collaboration. The image of the antithesis of man coexisting with the one of normative masculinity in the five Portuguese advertisements indicates that genre and gender are mutually and simultaneously fluid, with their boundary often blurred. That advertisements are often prone to changes in their function to attract customers implies new and evolving presentation forms of genre and gender. The combination of new and conventional images of masculinity, as shown in the analysis, impacts social and linguistic practices, particularly the fact that traditional norms of defining genre and gender, despite their resemblant quality, might be occasionally challenged or reconstructed in late-modern culture.

Call for Submissions

The editors invite your submissions to the following issues scheduled to appear in 2024. Send one hard copy of the manuscript double-spaced, including endnotes, along with an electronic copy (by e-mail attachment or in a shared folder online), following the style guidelines of the Chicago Manual of Style (17th ed., chap. 14 on documentation). More specific contributor guidelines may be consulted on the journal website. Manuscripts should not exceed 10,000 words inclusive of notes. Illustrations accompanying a manuscript should be submitted ideally in the form of TIFF digital files, and permissions for their reproduction must be provided before publication. Submissions pass through anonymous specialist review before publication. We do not consider articles that have been published elsewhere or are under simultaneous consideration with another publisher. Send to:Edited by Manuela Bragagnolo and John Jeffries MartinVolume 54 / Number 1 / January 2024Physiognomy was, as is well known, one of the most influential disciplines of the Renaissance. Based on the interpretation of bodily signs to read inner moral and intellectual inclinations, physiognomy developed in the West from the twelfth century and quickly acquired the status of a scientia normale in European universities. Drawing on both medical and divinatory origins, the science enjoyed great success in the sixteenth century, when, as Michel Foucault has famously demonstrated, the curiosity in decoding the secrets of nature placed physiognomic investigation in the framework of a new attention to signatures and sympathies. Physiognomy was grounded on the idea of a strong connection between body and soul. At its height, physiognomic pursuit functioned as a window opening onto the heart, lifting the veil of dissimulation and making visible invisible inner moral inclinations. The early modern period thus witnessed the emergence of a physiognomic mentality. But what has not been understood well so far is how jurists, judges, and more generally Renaissance legal culture theorized and made use of physiognomy and other related practices of reading the bodies or even the minds of those accused of crimes. This special issue seeks to show that late medieval and early modern culture was, indeed, deeply physiognomic not only in its literature and its theories but also in judicial practice. We invite contributions not only from scholars of the law but also from those working in any discipline (art history, history, literature, philosophy, or religion) whose work might cast light on this aspect of late medieval and early modern legal culture. Contributions may stress either courtroom practice or physiognomic theory more generally.Deadline for submissions: November 1, 2022Volume 54 / Number 2 / May 2024For this open-topic issue of the journal, the editors invite articles that are both informed by historical inquiry and alert to issues raised by contemporary theoretical debate. We expect that essays will be grounded in an intimate knowledge of a particular past and that their argumentation reveal a concern for the theoretical and methodological issues involved in interpretation. We are particularly committed to work that seeks to overcome the polarization between history and theory in the study of premodern Western culture.Submissions may be sent starting September 1, 2022Deadline for submission of manuscripts: March 1, 2023

Gambling Ain’t What It Used To Be: The Instrumentalization of Gambling and Late Modern Culture

This article addresses significant cultural macro-processes shaping legalized gambling as a mass consumer market, which also serve various state and private industry ends. The processes examined here are “instrumentalization” and rationalization, explored through the seminal formulations of Max Weber and developed further in the work of Jurgen Habermas. Instrumentalization relates to Weber’s concepts of rationalization and instrumental rationality, as well as to Habermas’s distinction between the “system” and “lifeworld”. While the phenomenon of instrumentalization is approached largely from a macro-perspective, it is understood to have effects on the lifeworld, on social action, and the formation of (gambling) subjectivities. The discussion of instrumentalization and rationalization, as broad cultural processes, contributes to the genealogy of gambling in (late) modern culture. It also serves to develop a particular theoretical trajectory within critical gambling studies and indicates themes that could be opened up for further analysis.

“Narratives of Anxiety” and Hidden Ontologies: Anti-vaccination Protest in “Conservative Orthodoxy” and Its Cultural Context

Protests against efforts toward coronavirus vaccination in 2020 and 2021 received significant support among Russian Orthodox “conservatives” or “fundamentalists” who consider vaccination to be a “chipping” that subordinates a person to hostile forces in preparation for the reign of the antichrist. The article examines the features of the conspiracy eschatology of modern Orthodox conservatives based on specific forms of ontology, aesthetics and social imagination. Abbot Roman Zagrebnev’s collected essays Deeds of Light and Deeds of Darkness (2016) and a number of other sources are used as empirical material for the analysis of these forms. The loss of a person’s individual agency as well as pollution, understood both in the moral and physiological sense, play a particular role in the social concept of conservative Orthodox. Each of these issues are discussed and represented with the help of bodily images and metaphors. The article attempts to see the meaning of conservative Orthodoxy not only through the prism of political ideals, social crises, and eschatological mythopoetics, but also through the connection of this particular type apocalyptic imagination of this kind and ideological holism as a crypto-ontology. The ‘holistic principle’ implies mutual conditionality and constant connection of physiological, moral and social categories and phenomena. This operates within concepts of an “expanded body” as an entity that is exposed to constant risks of pollution and loss of autonomy. In this context, the fear of vaccination, understood as both a form of physiological desecration and a means of social control, turns out to be a natural continuation of a broader ideological or ontological program that opposes the reductionist and discrete ideas about the world characteristic of late modern Western culture.

Eating alone, or commensality redefined? Solo dining and the aestheticization of eating (out)

Consumers’ increasing fascination with recreational eating out has contributed to numerous transformations in the upmarket restaurant practice. This paper explores such changes in regard to the “social” aspects of eating out, focusing particularly on the “cultural phenomenon” and practice of eating publicly alone (solo dining). Specifically, the paper extends previous portrayals of solo dining as a bundle of aloneness and togetherness by exploring such interplay in the context of the aestheticization of eating and/or the aesthetic food(ie) movement. Based on the interviews of Finnish food/restaurant enthusiasts and exponents of solo dining, the paper firstly depicts solo dining as a practice in which eating publicly alone is celebrated for the sake of enhanced aesthetic immersion. Secondly, the paper argues that solo dining can indeed be interpreted as a form of eating together and depicts the myriad ways, both concrete and “anonymous”, through which solo restaurant meals are shared between like-minded enthusiasts. Thus, the aesthetically oriented slice of solo dining becomes not understood as a complete departure from the ideal of shared public meals but as an alternative manifestation of commensality within an enthusiasm-based consumer group characteristic of late modern consumer culture.

IT and Data Mining in Decision-Making in the Organization. Education Management in the Culture of Late Modernity

Abstract One of the decision-making areas in an organization is the employee competences development. Unfortunately, an effective decision-making process is not fully supported nowadays. Dynamic development and dissemination of modern technologies, including data mining tools, could provide appropriate support while making decisions in organizations. Based on the conducted research, the authors of this paper pointed out to classification trees analysis for the selection of training participants. The use of new technologies in the decision-making process seems to minimize the risk within the analyzed problem, although it still leaves out some space for critical human factors. It leads to the conclusion that apart from risk, the inherent category of reality perception, is the category of trust.

Sacro-carescape

Abstract In the Netherlands mutual pastoral care is understood as an ecclesial practice where members of the congregation care for each other in everyday life. The growing interest in mutual pastoral care in Dutch Protestant congregations shows how pastoral care is moving from the ministers to the people and from the ecclesial domain to all kinds of places where people meet, in the public as well as the private sphere. The author reflects on this broadened scope of mutual pastoral care by elaborating on three characteristics: fluidization, informalization and sacredness. He argues that a broader perspective is needed to study mutual pastoral care in the context of our late-modern culture and explores how the concept of sacro-carescape contributes to a more adequate understanding of this practice.

Temporality and Mediality in Late Medieval and Early Modern Culture ed. by Christian Kiening, and Martina Stercken

Reviewed by: Temporality and Mediality in Late Medieval and Early Modern Culture ed. by Christian Kiening, and Martina Stercken Frank Swannack Kiening, Christian, and Martina Stercken, eds, Temporality and Mediality in Late Medieval and Early Modern Culture (Cursor Mundi, 32), Turnhout, Brepols, 2018; hardback; pp. x, 257; 50 b/w illustrations; R.R.P. €75.00; ISBN 9782503551302 Editors Christian Kiening and Martina Stercken focus their volume 'on the period around 1500' (p. 3). They argue that the 1500 period engages in a crucial temporal intersection of medieval and early modern mediality. The essays collected also reflect a recent trend in academic studies of the medieval period's important influence on early modern texts. Temporality and Mediality in Late Medieval and Early Modern Culture begins with Barbara Schellewald's analysis of the Cappella della Madonna dei Mascoli mosaic in St Mark's, Venice. The mosaic's depiction of celestial light represented by gold ground captures shifting light within the medieval church, to imply a viewer's engagement with 'sacred time' (p. 33). Schellewald makes an interesting observation that during the fifteenth century scientific advancements in optics led to gold ground being abandoned in images. The mosaic's traditional use of medieval gold ground, conversely, transcends early modern scientific developments. Marius Rimmele examines the symbolic folding and unfolding structures of religious triptychs in late medieval Antwerp and Cologne. Space and time are collapsed and extended so that the viewer either becomes part of the painting's spiritual world, or the 3D triptych infiltrates the viewer's temporal reality. The mediation of heavenly and earthly space and time is also the backbone of Britta Dümpelmann's study of St Mary's altarpiece by Veit Stoss in Kraców. By studying sculpture rather than paintings, Dümpelmann argues that touch is more important than sight. By 1500, the medieval sinful sexual connotations of touch are displaced by notions of embodiment and disembodiment. Heavenly and earthly time merge in the tangible visible spectacle of St Mary's sculpture. Kiening's contribution identifies how medieval salvation history mediates past, present, and future temporalities through the mortal and divine notions of the Passion. Examining texts of Christian pilgrimages to Palestine, Kiening infers that spiritual experiences contained by time and space are dwarfed by an eternal perspective. [End Page 221] Stercken explores Gerhard Mercator's world map of 1569. The common critical assumption is that Mercator's famous map showcases technical advancement over medieval cartography. Stercken argues that the medieval influence on Mercator of mediating time in pictorial and textual map-making has been ignored by academics. Mercator follows the encyclopaedic mappae mundi by inserting images of exotic beasts and written histories of newly discovered regions. He also uses early modern scientific technologies to augment his new map. As Stercken notes, Mercator borrows liberally from medieval traditions and early modern advancements to create a world map demonstrating universal knowledge that transcends time and space. Anja Rathmann-Lutz examines the Rudimentum Novitiorum (1475) through its innovative use of discontinuous text, pictorial family trees, charts, and illustrations. As Rathmann-Lutz argues, critics of the compendium have previously failed to acknowledge the Rudimentum Novitiorum's similarity to earlier illustrative histories. Readers are encouraged to flip back and forth through the compendium's different timelines to experience history as a form of medieval time travel. Marcus Sandl tackles the relationship between prophecies and prophets. He utilizes the medieval theological concept of the figura to argue that the prophet negotiates transition. Time is mediated through a prophetic exchange charting 'salvation history' (p. 221). The prophet's historical and theological knowledge is reinterpreted in an age of reformation obsessed with accumulating wealth, goods, commodities and information. To close the volume, Aleksandra Prica examines the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, printed in 1499. The close relationship between life and literature informs the essay, and Prica's main interest in the text lies with a particular form of allegorical interpretation. Meaning in the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili is created by a resonance of 'lingering', a literary conceit signified by narrative stasis or an accumulation of historical knowledge (p. 230), especially, as Prica argues, when the text encounters architectural ruins. The twin narrative functions of historical stagnation and tragedy become...

Categorías y problemas de análisis de las fuentes medievales del sermón moderno. La comunicación popular como acto aprehensible

La predicación popular y su registro histórico – los sermones – se han convertido en las últimas décadas en un recurso invaluable para el estudio de la cultura europea tardomedieval y moderna. A partir del desarrollo del campo han surgido nuevas perspectivas teóricas así como técnicas propias del estudio de la sermonística que valorizan su estudio. En este paper se presentan algunos de los debates y, en conexión a aquellos, una hermenéutica no filológica del abordaje de la predicación popular y sus fuentes. El objetivo es reivindicar el recurso como un registro de comunicación oral que puede ser estudiado y comprendido más allá de su contenido, y que permite una nueva mirada sobre la Europa pre-gutengberiana.

The sexual/gender differentiation—are the boundaries of gender struggle?

The author is discussing issues concerning gender differentiation in the sphere of economy, social roles and its cultural and biological roots. The anti-essentialist gender discourse is shown as emanation of two old ideas: the Marxist paradigm and gnostic concepts. Author indicate that the triumph of freedom in the culture of late modernity is not only the victory of culture over nature, but also, paradoxically for this culture, a simultaneous threat.

The Decline of the Mainline German Churches in Light of the Rise of Late Modern Popular Culture

This article studies the relation between the mainline German churches and late modern popular culture. It will be argued that the mainline churches have struggled to either defend themselves or to adopt the contemporary cultural trends that have been evolving since the mid-twentieth century. While the author does not argue for a causal relationship, there are reasons to assume that the simultaneous decline of the mainline churches and the rise of late modern popular culture is more than accidental.

Nostalgia, irony and collectivity in late-modern culture

The paper seeks to promote a sociological understanding of the current wave of nostalgic expressions haunting late-modern Western culture and to re-evaluate the predominantly negative assessment of nostalgia. Filling two gaps in the existing research on nostalgia, the authors wish (1) to reintegrate into the phenomenon its experiential and collective dimensions and (2) to propose a theoretical sociological framework capable of analysing nostalgic ritual. In the first part of the paper, we discuss different approaches to the phenomenon of nostalgia. Second, we delve into the complex emotional and experiential aspects of the phenomenon and distil three different types of nostalgia. Third, seeking inspiration from Émile Durkheim and Randall Collins, we scrutinise the common collective characteristics of these different types of nostalgia. Arguing that Collins remains too interactionist in his approach to ritual, we seek to erect a theoretical framework apt for articulating mediated forms of nostalgic ritual. Fourth, we use our theoretical framework to analyse a well-known instance of nostalgic ritual in Scandinavia: The Disney Christmas Show.

Doing military fitness: physical culture, civilian leisure, and militarism

Drawing explicitly upon the bodily techniques of military basic training and the corporeal competencies of ex-military personnel, military-themed fitness classes and physical challenges have become an increasingly popular civilian leisure pursuit in the UK over the last two decades. This paper explores the embodied regimes, experiences, and interactions between civilians and ex-military personnel that occur in these emergent hybrid leisure spaces. Drawing on ethnographic data, I argue that commercial military fitness involves a repurposing and rearticulation of collective military discipline within a late modern physical culture that emphasizes the individual body as a site of self-discovery and personal responsibility. Military fitness is thus a site of a particular biopolitics, of feeling alive in a very specific way. The intensities and feelings of physical achievement and togetherness that are generated emerge filtered through a particular military lens, circulating around and clinging to the totem of the repurposed ex-martial body. In the commercial logic of the fitness market, being ‘military’ and the ex-soldier’s body have thus become particularly trusted and affectively resonant brands.

Staging the Resurrection

This article looks at the particular ways in which the resurrection of Christ was staged in the public domain during four editions of a popular musical event named The Passion. Since its first edition in 2011, this annual performance on the suffering, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ has become a large media event in Dutch society. The author argues that its organizers—a television production company and two broadcasting companies—in their annual choices on how to shape and stage The Passion, make theological choices. Moreover, she argues that the staged theology of the organizers is to be considered a form of public theology. Pointing out that authority in late-modern network culture is subject of change, the author reveals how the production and broadcasting companies by organizing and actualizing a passion both prove themselves a leading party in the actualization of Christian tradition and turn up as players in the field of public theology.

"The Happiness of 'Slight Superiority'": Kierkegaard and Nietzsche on Resentment

My aim in this essay is to pair Kierkegaard with the German-born philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900). I am particularly concerned to juxtapose their complementary investigations into the etiology and operation of resentment, which both thinkers identified as exerting a powerfully retardant force within the bourgeois societies of late modern European culture. Indeed, both were concerned to demonstrate the extent to which the corrosive power of resentment had transformed the religious injunction to “love thy neighbor” into a culturally sponsored program to “beggar thy neighbor.” 
 The result of this pairing, or so I hope to demonstrate, is a productive division of philosophical labor: From Nietzsche, on the one hand, Kierkegaard’s readers may gain a clear sense of how a community founded on ressentiment may accommodate “healthy” expressions of comparative advantage and relative superiority. Even when exaggerated and amplified, however, these expressions pose no threat to the conservative, contractionary structure of the ethical life of the community in question. In particular, as we shall see, Nietzsche’s account of ressentiment may explain that, and why, the seemingly daring meditation conducted by Johannes de silentio in Fear and Trembling yields such a muddled and unsatisfying conclusion.