Politics Of Negation Research Articles

Harold Macmillan, Margaret Thatcher and British Conservatism’s Politics of Negation

A distinction is often made between two traditions of British Conservative thought: the paternalist “one nation/middle way” tradition, and the more libertarian one that is associated with Margaret Thatcher. Typically, this distinction is mapped onto the ideas that Conservatives hold about equality. While “one nation” Conservatives condone some forms of redistribution, their libertarian counterparts, it is argued, do not. This article reassesses this distinction by comparing the political thinking of two representatives of the two traditions: Harold Macmillan and Margaret Thatcher. Comparing Macmillan and Thatcher’s views on equality, it is argued, is inappropriate as a way of distinguishing between their respective ideologies. Instead, we should draw a distinction between the way that Macmillan and Thatcher arrived at their views about equality. On his part, Macmillan adopted a triadic logic. By conceiving of a “middle way”, he defined his conservatism in relation to the dangerous “extremes” of free market capitalism and state socialism. Thatcher, by contrast, adopted a dyadic logic. Instead of locating herself between two “extremes”, she employed a series of binary distinctions to establish her conception of conservatism. Freedom was preferred to equality; the market was preferred to the state, and so on. The article explores the implications of these differing logics, and it concludes if we are to identify different variants of conservatism, we should be just as concerned with their modes of negation as we are with the affirmative claims they make about concepts like equality.

The ear from nowhere: Listening techniques and the politics of negation in the practice of Japanese interfaith chaplains

This article examines the politics of listening in the work of Japanese interfaith chaplains. It argues that listening is an important but often overlooked aspect of language ideologies and, more specifically, of the formation of modern subjects. Interfaith chaplains are religious professionals who apply principles of clinical psychology to help people in settings ranging from hospices to disaster areas. The desire to help suffering people who do not share the same religious backgrounds as the chaplains motivates them to cultivate what I call an “ear from nowhere,” which is divorced from their respective religious traditions and from speaking-based authority.

Fabulation as a pedagogical possibility: working towards a politics of affirmation

The wave of student-led protests that have taken place across the South African higher education landscape over the last two years provides us, as teacher educators, with the opportune time to reflect on how our pedagogical practices relate to larger societal transformative imperatives. We engage with the relationship between pedagogical practices and social transformation by attending to questions concerning identity, intersubjectivity, and group relations. We argue that conventional pedagogical practices that work towards social justice are entangled with and regulated by identity politics, and that such a position equates these pedagogical practices with a politics of negation and ressentiment. By drawing on Deleuze’s interpretation of the concept of fabulation and Deleuze and Guattari’s argument that desire is a positive social force that enables experimentation to occur, we re-imagine the idea of a pedagogy as a politics of affirmation. Such politics, we argue, makes possible the constitution of new social collectivities that are able to escape the gravitational pull of identity politics and ressentiment. We posit that, in the midst of student protests, this is an important first step in generating the conditions to experiment with the creation of a different, more socially just future.

The Ethics and Politics of Negation: the Postdramatic on Screen

The Ethics and Politics of Negation:the Postdramatic on Screen Angelos Koutsourakis (bio) The Ethics of Spectatorship and the Postdramatic On June 22, 2008, in a television interview with Alexander Kluge, the Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke was asked to explain his ethical approach to filmmaking. His response was that the prerequisite for making films ethically lies in a filmmaking practice that takes the spectator seriously and stimulates the viewer’s imagination. Haneke’s raison d’être is grounded in the idea that unlike literature, film runs the risk of restricting people’s imagination by showing and clarifying everything. As he says, “one ought to work against this wherever possible…Film, like any other art, should produce a dialogue, not a monologue. Omitting explanation is one of the many ways of inspiring the viewer’s imagination.” Haneke’s argument provides a point of entry into thinking about cinema and ethics through the postdramatic lens; according to Hans-Thies Lehmann, the fundamental principle of postdramatic representation is the negation of strategies of dramatic concreteness and the Hegelian view of drama as the conflict of moral attitudes. The postdramatic resists the “Wholeness” of dramatic art and valorizes the idea of representation as a process; it postpones the production of meaning and this is an ethical representational approach, because it negates uniform interpretations and asks the audience to co-produce meaning rather than endorse predetermined conclusions (Postdramatisches 246).1 As also mentioned by Haneke, omitting explanation can be an ethical, but also a political act. Both Haneke’s and Lehmann’s comments recall critical theory’s privileging of an aesthetics of negation. From Adorno’s idea that authentic art does not simply produce “messages” to be consumed but is committed to an aesthetics of “enigmaticalness” and “determinate negation” (129), to Alexander Kluge and Oscar Negt’s idea that “the domain of the irrational” in art is “the domain of protest,” there is a late Marxist tradition that privileges aesthetic negation as the sine qua non of social critique (239). The ethical implications of such an approach rest on the refusal to reproduce a reified reality and the desire to activate feelings of protest – what Kluge and Negt name “the antirealism of feelings” that assist individuals in renouncing a “reality that injures” them (414). [End Page 155] Such a valorization of aesthetic negation sits at the antipodes of the Cultural Studies turn to universalizing moral questions about the representations of the other, and the exploration of ethics in cinema via methodological approaches proposed by analytical philosophy. Activating a dialogue between the viewer and the object is a modus operandi that sits uneasily with the normative reproduction of moralist assertions and the unresponsive consumption of ideas. Yet recent work in film studies in the area of the ethics of representation seems to be content with more conventional, monological narratives and approaches to the question of cinema as a medium of ethical thinking.2 The determining context for much of this work is the understanding of representation as a communication model. David Bordwell aptly explains that such a model (and let me stress that he does not endorse it) presupposes, “that the plans and intentions of the filmmaker shape the movie, which becomes a vehicle for an embedded content” (Bordwell, “Part-Time Cognitivist” 1-2). Telling in this respect is the work of the moral philosopher Berys Gaut. Gaut goes to great lengths to explain the potential ethical benefits of the audience’s identification with either positive characters in a film or characters who might be deluded or mistaken but whose counter-example can help the audience “grow emotionally.” Gaut surmises that identification with characters can “teach an audience about correct emotional responses” (69). Ethics in this school of thought is invoked in a manner that does not reflect on the reduction of spectatorial labor to a reception of “correct values.” Such nuances are also overlooked by Noël Carroll, who has recently offered an analysis of the tropes and the emotional strategies employed by narratives aiming to overcome biases against homophobia or racism in order to produce moral change. The examples put forward by Carroll are the novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) and the film...

The Ethics and Politics of Negation: the Postdramatic on Screen

The Ethics and Politics of Negation: the Postdramatic on Screen

Reviews: Music and the Politics of Negation

Music and the Politics of Negation , by James R. Currie. Musical Meaning & Interpretation. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2012. xxi, 222 pp. In James Currie's book, a distantly Adornian conception of negation organizes a series of close readings of compositions by Mozart and Haydn, plus a concluding excursus on the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra. It amounts to a defense—timely, some would say—of values that have been under the cosh lately: aesthetic autonomy and the human autonomy that it ostensibly models; the utopian potential and politically resistant capacity of art; and the continuing importance of canonical (that is: late eighteenth-century Viennese) music. Consequently, the book is also a sustained critique of the liberal intellectual vernacular of much present-day musicological discourse: happy-clappy pluralism, which arguably echoes the foodcourt multiculturalism of free-market ideologies; knee-jerk historicism, which tends to imagine that its methods axiomatically puncture the lofty aspirations of the aesthetic by exposing art's origins; the idea that disenchantment and demystification, in a sort of permanent intellectual upheaval, should be the main elements of a musicologist's job description; the broadly postmodern suspicion of any perspective that can be described as “totalizing”—and indeed any artistic practice that professes to transcend the quotidian, or the material given-ness of the world as it is. Though I have a great many doubts about the particulars of this book's arguments and argumentation, these broad preoccupations are, it seems to me, important—even pressing. This study will not be everyone's cup of tea. This is partly because of its tone, which is by turns playful and portentous, knottily abstract, sweepingly big-picture, and self-consciously eclectic in its range of collateral reference. Certainly, this book at times wears its learning rather heavily, ostentatiously parading its intellectual gurus in a way that can be distracting to read. Early on, one characteristic paragraph (pp. 3–4) develops a boldly adumbrated claim about the history of mirror metaphors via Romantic theories of the uncanny, a frothy description of the climactic bathroom …

Reviews:Music and the Politics of NegationMusic and the Politics of Negation, by James R. Currie . Musical Meaning & Interpretation. Bloomington and Indianapolis : Indiana University Press , 2012 . xxi , 222 pp.

Reviews:<i>Music and the Politics of Negation</i><i>Music and the Politics of Negation</i>, by James R. Currie . Musical Meaning &amp; Interpretation. Bloomington and Indianapolis : Indiana University Press , 2012 . xxi , 222 pp.

Music and the Politics of Negation by James R. Currie (review)

and Politics of Negation. By James R. Currie. (Musical Meaning and Interpretation.) Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012. [xxi, 222 p. ISBN 9780253357038 (hardcover), $34.95; (e-book), $28.99.] examples, bibliography, index.In his book, and Politics of Negation, James R. Currie employs following sections: Veils (Mozart, Piano Concerto K. 459, Finale); Dreams (Fugal Counterpoint); Exile (Haydn, String Quartet Op. 33, No. 5); Enchantment (Mo - zart, La clemenza di Tito); and Forgetting (Edward Said). Currie's overarching enterprise has been to elevate from rubble of its political setting. As James Garratt said in his review of book, where he compared it with Music after All (Journal of American Musi cological Society 62, no. 1 [Spring 2009]: 145-204), the version of this argument presented in and Politics of Negation is considerably more nuanced (Music & Letters 94, no. 3 [2013]: 528). Nevertheless, unprimed reader of book may experience a jolt when Currie equates smugness of current musicology with self-congratulatory stance of late capitalism-a state that he rightly opines is unwarranted with current situation of world, postcollapse of Eastern European communisms and, principally, post-fall of Berlin Wall: catastrophic political instability, global financial crisis, coldly indifferent markets unmasked, fragility of democracy, and failure of Leftin Britain.By Currie's account, new or musicology's transhistoricalness causes it, ironically, to enact psychoanalytic condition of projectional disavowal, through replicating the dynamics of very object that it nearly always rejects in order to validate itself (p. x). This leads to a of exclusion-of music and (p. x). In what can be seen as an updated application of Fredric Jameson's insights in Postmodernism, or, Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Post- Contemporary Interventions [Durham: Duke University Press, 1991]), Currie specifically situates new musicology's identity politics as a reflection of heinousness of this phase in our political history. Currie leads us through analyses founded on typical new musicology paradigms-while yet managing, simultaneously, to champion revivification of aesthetic autonomy- all of which arrive at some point of negation, so that negation of egregious political situations can occur through music. I would have welcomed more teasing-out of charge that new musicology has a general sense of political well-being (p. x). Nor was I explicitly shown this structural replicating. One might ask whether aligning new musicology with its dominant political context just because both came into being at same time is not in itself an act of historicizing!In his analysis of works from classical era, Currie's argument is that straying from established forms equates with political activism-an example of which is analogy that concerto form embodies dynamic of individual versus society, which Currie explores through Finale of Mozart's Piano Concerto in F major, K.459, and which provides a parallel for our contemporary situation. Currie addresses Wye J. Allanbrook's postmodern (A Millennial Mozart? Mozart Society of America Newsletter 3, no. 2 [Summer 1999]: 2-4) at length here. This trope might well smack of a restaging of Susan McClary's and others' approaches-and indeed, Currie informs us that his own approach is not an argu ment against those who have inspired him (Berthold Hoeckner, Michael Spitzer, Daniel Chua, Lydia Goehr and Martin Scherzinger [p. xv]). These are all authors who would be described as new musicologists or, in U.K., as part of British critical musicology approach. (It is refreshing to this reader that there are only two references, judiciously selected, to Gilles Deleuze.) But Currie then proceeds to refute his own slant here by uncovering its innate instability. …

Voyelles mutilées, consonnes aux jambages arrachés: Linda Lê's Compulsive Tracing, Erasing, and Re-Tracing Fragments of the Self in Writing

This article examines how, through tropes of female madness and female suicide, Linda Lê exposes a compulsive process of composition and de-composition of writing and the self. Lê traces, erases, and re-traces her mutilated central characters—particularly the (dead) father figure; the central protagonists and narrators (often a femme de lettres); the figure of the potential mother; and the unborn son. The trajectory reveals a self at first in crisis, manifest in the spectral, uncanny madness dominating Voix (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1998) and exposing an anxiety of female authorship. Lê appears to overcome this through an assumption of authorship apparently predicated on abjecting the feminine and the maternal, and incorporating the masculine, early on in the form of the dead father in Lettre morte (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1999), and later the unborn son. Lê’s later works present a politics of negation personified in the putatively mad, suicidal, and certainly rebellious figure of Antigone haunting what I call Lê’s Antigone tryptych, comprising In memoriam (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 2007), Cronos (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 2010), and À l’enfant que je n’aurai pas (Paris: Nil, 2011). I conclude that this process is deeply ambivalent, raising surprising questions about contemporary women writers.

Music and the politics of negation

Preface: A No-Music 1. Veils (Mozart, Piano Concerto K. 459, Finale) 2. Dreams (Fugal Counterpoint) 3. Exile (Haydn, String Quartet Op. 33, No. 5) 4. Enchantment (Mozart, La clemenza di Tito) 5. Forgetting (Edward Said) Notes Bibliography Index

Music, Masculinity and the Claims of History: The Austro-German Tradition from Hegel to Freud. By Ian Biddle. * Music and the Politics of Negation. By James R. Currie.

Music, Masculinity and the Claims of History: The Austro-German Tradition from Hegel to Freud. By Ian Biddle. * Music and the Politics of Negation. By James R. Currie.

What is to be Done? Leninism, Anti-Leninist Marxism and the Question of Revolution Today

What is to be done? new times and the anniversary of a question, Werner Bonefeld, Sergio Tischler. Part I What is to be done? in historical and critical perspective: Kronstadt - proletarian spin-off of the Russian revolution, Cajo Brendel perspectives on left politics - on the development of an anti-Leninist conception of socialist politics, Diethard Behrens was Lenin a Marxist? the populist roots of Marxism-Leninism, Simon Clarke the dialectic of labour and human emancipation, Mike Rooke. Part II What is to be learned? contemporary capitalism and the politics of negation: the command of money-capital and the Latin American crisis, Alberto Bonnet state, revolution and social self-determination, Werner Bonefeld Lenin on the production of revolution, George Caffentzis the crisis of the Leninist subject and the Zapatista circumstance, Sergio Tischler. Part III What about revolution? ends and means: emancipation - path and goals, Johannes Agnoli revolt and revolution or get out of the way, capital!, John Holloway.

Diaspora, Gender, and Nation: The Case of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictée

The aim of this article is to re-conceptualize the recent diaspora from a corporeal materialist feminist perspective while exploring the issue of decolonizing political agency in our increasingly globalizing capitalist patriarchal era. I therefore look at the complex and multiple relations among diaspora, gender, and nation. Dictée by a Korean-American woman writer, Cha Hak Kyung (1982/1995), is a text that embodies the material traces emerging from colonial/national/transnational bodies and locations, which are radically different from the de-historicized, de-politicized terrain of postmodern hybrid subjects. When we conceptually distinguish “diaspora” from nomad, exile, and immigrant, and then conceptualize it from a corporeal materialist feminist perspective, it emerges as a subversive political figure embodying a political struggle that seeks to define the local/national against the historical contexts of displacement and makes visible the bodies and labor of women. Then, “diaspora” can encompass the problem of the gendered subaltern against liberalist bourgeois elitist agenda, by persistently unlearning the globalizing re-arrangement of the apparently multicultural “empire,” and consciously dis-identifying the totalistic and oppressive national/transnational unity and agency.Clearly aware of (neo)colonial violence and trauma, Cha Hak Kyung attempts to represent the multiple and complexly colonized conditions in which she lives and under which her cultural in-between-ness is formed, via the politics of a double negation of both empire and “home” land. She strives to empower herself by breaking the silence imposed on her, and to engender her own “foreign” languages that can be defined as unwriting or blood writing. Cha's re/unwriting the histories of her eastern and western mothers' bodies and her reconstruction of nation as a feminist genealogy, are read primarily against the political unconscious which is basically patriarchal and tends to erase the women's bodies. As such, Dictée refigures “diaspora” as a politically-informed agency. It revises colonialist/nationalist/neocolonialist historiography through the deconstructing energies of gender and subalternity and presents the “nation” as the location to resist globalization and Americanization, although it sometimes unwittingly ignores women's labor.

Spectres of Marx and Braverman in the Twilight of Postmodernist Labour Process Research

John Bellamy Foster's 1998 introduction to the 25th anniversary edition of Braverman's Labor and Monopoly Capital (1998) missed an opportunity in failing to engage the industry of (largely British) postmodernist labour process scholarship that followed the first edition of the book. This research `almost universally rejects [Braverman's] understanding of the labour process' (Spencer, 2000: 223). Using Braverman (and Marx) as benchmarks, this article finds the postmodernist tradition deficient in several respects. First, it consistently underappreciates the political aims and impact of Braverman's work (notwithstanding constant rhetorical support for political engagement). Second, it remains incorrigibly philosophical (logocentric) - entrapped in incessant recycling of philosophies of undecidability. Despite claims to reject the hubris of Cartesian analysis, it remains infatuated by it. Third, it misconstrues Braverman's anthropological humanism as a degenerate form of (idealistic) humanism, and thus leaves underexplored the dialectical politics of transcendent negation. Fourth, it psychologizes social and political processes, and ultimately retreats to an unreconstructed notion of ideology, where working people are construed as wrongheaded for seeking refuge from coercion in supposedly false identities. Fifth, in urging working people to release an `inner self' from a false identity, the analysis presupposes an underlying human essence that is atheoretical and essentialist. Finally, the analysis is blind to the social and historical specificity of Braverman's political task; exposing `skill upgrading via education' as an ideology that obfuscates economic decline, recession and deindustrialization. The upgrading canard - expounded by all recent US presidents up to George W. Bush III - is dutifully discharged (to this day) by most business schools and management centres, including those in Britain.