Material Social Relations Research Articles

Towards a sociological anthropology: On Theodor Adorno's Contribution to the Theory of Ideology

Adorno's argument in this recently translated essay is that sociology is necessary in order to unlock the ‘epistemological power’ of the concept of ideology. This paper reads Adorno's argument with an Althusserian guilt in order to isolate the theoretically anti-humanist character of this epistemological power. The paper demonstrates how sociology, for Adorno, unlocks this epistemological power by shifting the field of inquiry away from the psychology of the individual subject, towards the “objectively prescribed contexts of delusion” located at the meeting point of specific material social relations. In order to make sense of Adorno's theoretical work here, the paper employs the concept of ‘anthropology’ as developed by Étienne Balibar, in order to demonstrate how Adorno mobilises the concept of ideology in order to think about subjective interpellation in an anti-humanist way, breaking with the vulgar psychology of traditional theories of ideology.

Extended body … extended mind: The risk of thought

Communication may be understood through its manifest meaning or through the medium in which it is expressed. The latter approach begins from the material social relations and technologies that constitute the medium of communication. This approach has a certain similarity with affect theory understood as a pre-cognitive focus on bodies and technologies. An affective network sets up the manifest subject–object, or human–machine, relations with a subjectified anxiety. The objectification of intelligence produces a fundamental anxiety about what it is to be human. I attempt to determine where thought may yet intervene in a world of algorithms which is pervaded by anxiety.

Double Erasure Under 21st Century Virtual Capitalism

ABSTRACT This article traces the mechanism of social erasure under various regimes of global capitalism. It proposes that the current regime of virtual global capitalism has shifted the way that erasure functions in the 21st century. The article delineates new mechanisms of erasure called “double erasure.” The article then traces double erasure in the lives of Black men. Finally, proposals are made as to how social work and human services might respond to double erasure in ways that reaffirm the world of living material social relations.

Re-embodying Syrinx in the ancient Peloponnese and French colonial Belle Époque: Investigating bodily change associated with sexual assault

This article investigates related contexts and connections that both hide and display the coercion and sexual violence manifest in Western cultural and aesthetic artefacts during ancient Greek and Roman eras and the French imperialist epoch. Exploring ‘Pan and Syrinx’ from Ovid’s ‘Book I’ of the Metamorphoses (8 ce) and Claude Debussy’s Syrinx (1913) for solo flute, I historicise the meanings of rape and sexual assault that informed Ovid’s epic and then revisit the genesis of Debussy’s Syrinx because of the uneasy elements surrounding its creation. I show how its cultural production is complicit with the imperial in several ways. I consider how sexual violence impacts voice, subjectivity and the body, and finally, I draw on Luce Irigaray’s work to sketch an embodied Syrinx in relation with others and her environment. I suggest the desiring potential of sexual difference, with limitations, as a generative conception of figuring the feminine-maternal body beyond masculine appropriation. In this way I open the myth up to watery material-social relations.

Introduction to the politics of life: A biopolitical mess

This introduction to the special issue focuses on the messiness of biopolitics. The biopolitical is a composite mixture of heterogeneous, and sometimes conflicting, forces, discourses, institutions, laws, and practices that are embedded in and animated by material social relations. In the now extensive literature on biopolitics, our biopolitical era is characterized by the blending and mixing of what were previously thought of as separate realms: life is biologized, politics is biologized and biology is politicized, life and politics have been economized, and making life is intertwined with making death. This article provides a general overview of two strains of these biopolitical entanglements. It begins by examining the largely French and Italian focus on how politics and life have become economized in contemporary neoliberalism. We then turn to the mainly Anglo-American focus on the biologization of life. It concludes by taking up the central problem that arises from the messiness of biopolitics: whither the political of the biopolitical economy of life? Is there such a thing as the political proper in our era? If not, then what type of politics must be deployed to address the issues of our biopolis?

Power for Pleasure

Margot Weiss, Techniques of Pleasure: BDSM and the Circuits of Sexuality, Durham & London, Duke University Press, 2011, 315pp, $24.95 paperback In this timely work, Weiss interrogates the purported transgressiveness of BDSM subcultures and practices using ethnographic research methods and the insights of feminism and queer theory. BDSM culture is understood, not as a utopian realm of free expression that escapes the influence of everyday life, but rather as 'a formally organized community with very particular social and educational practices' (p5), which is shot through with 'often-invisible race and class privilege' (p5). The mention of 'circuits' in the subtitle of the book alludes to the key thesis Weiss propounds: namely that the BDSM lifestyle and the neo-liberal marketplace exist in a relationship of mutual interdependency, rather than the former offering any kind of inherent critique of, or challenge to, the latter. And, more broadly, Weiss's circuitry imagery suggests that sexuality is always in a relationship with economic and social power structures and hierarchies, rather than lying beyond them. Indeed, for Weiss, 'although sexuality is imagined as a break from material social relations, sexuality is, instead, the raw material of these circuits' (p230). The research that led to this book involved Weiss's thorough submersion as a participant observer in the Bay Area BDSM scene. Weiss attended a number of events such as play parties, munches (social events where sexual acts are discouraged), clubs, fund-raising auctions such as the 'Byzantine Bazaar', and educational classes. She worked as a volunteer archivist for the Society of Janus. She also interviewed sixty-one participants whose interviews form the basis of the data on which she draws in analyzing the subculture, its practitioners, and its practices. Weiss establishes a dichotomy (that some scholars, such as Gayle Rubin, would likely question) between the 'old guard' and 'new guard' of BDSM participants in her field. The 'old guard' describes the gay leather men who lived in the Folsom Street district of San Francisco prior to the AIDS crisis and the area's gentrification, and who are seen as now existing on the margins of mainstream consumer culture. The 'new guard' comprises younger players who self-identify largely as heterosexual, bisexual, or pansexual; are internet-savvy and often employed in the IT sector; and are heavily consumerist in lifestyle and sex-style. Weiss is particularly interested in how much money these 'new guard' BDSMers spend on toys, costumes and other paraphernalia, seeing in the financial commitment to the scene the players make one of the main ways in which 'SM produces both subjects and communities' via engagement in 'consumer practices' as well as the acquisition of 'SM techniques' (p111). The argumentational thread drawing together the various analyses in Techniques of Pleasure is the idea that the alternative scene of BDSM is alternative only in very limited ways. It fails, for example, to exclude mainstream prejudices and stereotypes; indeed it shores up many normative assumptions about gender, heterosex and race, replicating, at the very least, the appearance of systems of oppression within the community space. Describing the various participants in the Byzantine Bazaar, she asks 'how do we read the political effects of ... selling black bodies at a pretend slave auction in front of an almost exclusively white audience?' (pp56). Yet, Weiss also reported some disquiet and demurring among the audience at the spectacle of the black woman offered 'for sale' by her white 'master', suggesting that the question she poses is already--at least implicitly--working on those participating in the community. That the problem of race remains implicit, however, is returned to in Weiss's Chapter 4, where she explores the similarity between BDSM dynamics and mainstream sexual and relationship norms. Many players interviewed by Weiss, keen to insist upon the transgressiveness of BDSM and to reinforce the boundary between it and its vanilla counterpart, articulated concern that, too often, heterosexual BDSM partnerships take the form of dominant men and submissive women in a constellation that seems to ape the heteronormative stereotype and the patriarchal power dynamic. …

Witches, Matriarchs, and Whores: Casting Intrasexual and Intersexual Oppression in Caryl Churchill's VINEGAR TOM

Contemporary feminist theater practice undertakes gender critique and sexual difference, or the representation of gender in material social relations and in discursive and representational structur...

Introduction

There are four themes that weave their way through the research thread on Mobilisations, Interventions, and Cultural Policy in this issue. First, there is concern with intervention—intervention into the politics and practices of social movements and intervention into the academy and its traditions of knowledge production. Second, each text is situated firmly within a recognition and appreciation of social movements as knowledge producers. Third, all three contributions are unequivocally located in an urban context and the contemporary condition of inhabiting the city. Finally, what emerges from each reflection is a commitment to militant research and practice, as one that keeps ever-present an awareness of the relationship of research to existing material social relations of power and a commitment to confronting and transforming these very relations.

Locating Difference: Class, ‘Race’ and Gender, and the Shaping of Social Inequalities

The current interest in difference has arisen in part because of its importance in recent recognition claims, and in part because of a belief that as a concept it can illuminate social diversity. Debates here have stressed the importance of the symbolic in the construction of social relations and social diversity, and have highlighted the relational underpinnings of diversity. In this paper we seek to take forward aspects of such an analysis by examining some issues in the shaping of difference and inequalities in the domains of gender, class and ‘race’. It is our argument that we can gain insights in these domains by better describing and theorising the mutuality of value and material social relations. The paper argues that issues of identity and difference need to be more firmly located within relational accounts of social practice, and in the nature of claims (to recognition and resources) which emerge out of different social locations. By exploring issues of difference in debates on class, gender and ‘race’, we argue that relational accounts must be placed within a perspective that also emphasises the content and patterned nature of (highly differentiated) social relations.

Embodying Orgasm

In this paper we discuss the potential for developing a feminist approach to women's sexual embodiment via an exploration of heterosexual sexuality. We contest both pre-social, biological accounts of sexuality and supra-social accounts: those that fail to locate desire and pleasure in their social context. In so doing we seek to avoid more abstract forms of social constructionism by analysing gendered, sexual bodies in interaction and bodies as located in material social relations and practices. In focusing on sexual pleasure we will contest dis-embodied, asocial formulations of desire and consider how desire and pleasure may be reflexively understood in the context of everyday/everynight sexual practices. Taking orgasm as a paradigmatic case, we will consider the relationships between the ways in which women's orgasm is conventionally represented and the social construction of “faked” and “authentic” orgasms.

Cultural Rules and Material Relations

This paper attempts to synthesize the Winchian stress on constitutive rules with the Marxian stress on material relationships by developing the concept of emergently material social relations. Such relationships, it is argued, arise from the constitutive rules that constitute a group's way of life. Although such relationships thus are derivative from the conscious rule-following behavior of actors, nevertheless they have an objective existence independent of actors' specific awareness. It is argued that such material relations are an important mechanism beyond the cultural rules through which our behavior is constrained, enabled, and motivated. Yet the Winchian tradition in general and contemporary structuration theory in particular have tended to peripheralize the notion of material relations, treating them largely as epiphenomenal abstractions. This, it is argued, is a mistake and the source of an important lacuna in structuration theory. In particular, because structuration theory decenters the actor, conflates the distinction between regulative and constitutive rules, and peripheralizes social relations, it lacks an adequate explanation of motivation, as symptomized by its inordinate appeal to the unconscious. The concept of emergently material social relations overcomes this problem and offers a reintegration of the Marxian and the Winchian traditions. In this paper I attempt to synthesize a Winchian stress on cultural rules with a traditional Marxian stress on material relations. Whereas Winch (1958) argued that actors' collective self-understanding of what they are doing must be the starting point of any social analysis, certain traditional readings of Marx have always maintained that the proper starting point of analysis must be the objective or material conditions in which actors are situated. This paper offers a synthesis of these seemingly opposed views by emphasizing two distinctions. The first distinction is between context and behavior. Both the Winchian and the Marxian views tend to agree that social behavior must be explained in terms of its context. They disagree, however, on the nature of that context. Whereas Winch stressed the cultural context created by constitutive rules, the relevant Marxian tradition emphasizes the material context created by objective social structural relations. I will argue here that a more complete context for explaining behavior involves both constitutive rules and material relations, and that this context analytically precedes actors' further self-understanding of and behavior in their situation. Actually I propose a dialectical process that augments Giddens's stratification model of action such that the material and cultural context is both the condition and the outcome of social behavior.