Possessive Individualism Research Articles

The ontology of personhood and a realist critique of the policy discourse based on skills

This paper uses the critical realist concept of human reflexivity to dev­elop a theoretical critique of the notion of ‘skills’ in current policy discourses, particularly in vocational education. We argue that current policy reifies skills as market commodities and alienates them from the minds, bodies, and hands of those who exercise them and the social contexts in which they are deployed. This is traced to historical ideas of a liberal market society, resulting in an impoverished view of human beings and human agency. The skills discourse presumes people’s reasons to value things they care about arise from possessive individualist preferences and external conditioning of atomistic social and material utility. In contrast, we suggest real people act on reasons they value to learn things and practice their skills or not, which resonates with the ontology of personhood, the intrinsic worth of human beings, and a rounded notion of human agency.

ONE-YEAR PROSPECTIVE STUDY OF PATTERNS OF HOMICAL DEATHS- AN AUTOPSY BASED STUDY

Objectives: The aim of the study was to observe the profiling of the homicidal cases for 1 year. Methods: The present study was a prospective 1-year study of all autopsies alleged to be homicide under 302 Indian Penal Code, performed in the department of forensic medicine and toxicology at Government Medical College, Amritsar, Punjab, India, from January 01, 2021 to December 31, 2021, (1-year period) after taking permission from the institutional ethical committee. Results: The majority of cases reported were in the age group of 20–49 years, with 24 (61.5%) cases, followed by the age group of 40–59 years, which had 13 (33.3%) cases. 37 (94.9%) cases were males, followed by females 02 (5.1%).The male-to-female sex ratio is 18.5:1; 30 (76.9%) were married, while 09 (23.1%) were unmarried. The deaceased had Sikh religion in 24 (61.6%) cases, followed by Hindus in 11 (28.2%) cases; 26 (66.7%) belonged to the rural area, while 13 (33.3%) belonged to the urban area. The majority of cases where only a sharp weapon was used were 16 (41%), followed by both blunt and sharp in 14 (35.9%) cases, and blunt only in 06 (15.4%). Firearms were used in 03 (7.7%) cases. Conclusion: Based on the aforementioned observations, we believe there is a pressing need to address issues concerning youth, given their frequent involvement in such crimes. Additionally, enforcing strict nighttime surveillance and rigorously implementing laws against individuals in possession of dangerous weapons can contribute significantly to reducing such crimes.

Implicated Realism and the Environmentalism of the Rich in Ben Lerner’s 10:04

Abstract: This essay argues that Ben Lerner’s novel 10:04 (2014) employs “implicated realism” to represent the environmentalism of the rich. Implicated realism is a self-reflexive aesthetic that reveals how the foundations of literary realism—narrative description, bourgeois settings, an emphasis on daily life—rely upon the forms of exploitation that have also produced the climate crisis. I demonstrate that implicated realism in 10:04 , paradoxically, consists of both hyperrealism and realist failure. Lerner’s novel applies hyperrealist description to seemingly innocuous scenes, uncovering their implication in the uneven distribution of environmental harm. Such hyperrealism exists alongside realist failure, which 10:04 both thematizes and performs. Through realist failure, then, implicated realism confronts the compromised history of realism and its association with possessive individualism and extractive capitalism. Consequently, although many ecocritics discount realism’s ability to represent climate change, this essay identifies implicated realism as a self-reflexive and adaptive mode.

Differential Dispossession and the White Indigenous Counter-Reformation

A history of inheritance in the thinking of Karrabing Film Collective, from Belyuen, the small Indigenous community in Australia. Speaking across from Oceania to Alps, to Central Europe via Australia, and finally on zoom between New York and Vienna, Elizabeth Povinelli and Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll discuss relations to Country through the voices of ancestors. This is a polyphony in an everywhen in which everyone is present. Possessive individuals appear as zombie, while inheritance can also be a way of hearing the consequences of not listening, in a process Elizabeth Povinelli calls the white indigenous counter-reformation.

Rehearsals of Release

Dispossession is not only harmful for the material deprivations it instantiates (though these harms are brutal, even genocidal). To the extent that dispossession occurs within a societal context in which possession is the ultimate virtue, dispossession further diminishes the social significance of those dispossessed; beneath a global regime of neoliberalism, to be lacking in possessions is to be rendered non-agential, unworthy of political representation, and, ultimately, subject to premature death for the profit of others. In the United States and other white-dominated nations, the sickness of white supremacy and its coinciding colonial incursions are rooted in liberal notions of property, doctrines of what can be possessed, what significance possession confers, and who is permitted to do the possessing. This possessive individualism benefits those who have longest held the ability to accumulate wealth via dispossession: already-wealthy white men. This social reality has ruinous effects for those whose cultural values are not predicated on possession yet are subject to the hegemonic forces of white supremacy. In this writing, I propose three “rehearsals of release,” replicable and mutational performances, that can be practically implemented in the lives of those with Settler inclinations. These rehearsals are designed to lessen tendencies toward dispossession and replace them with practices of de-possession, the exploration of a life lived in affinity with ongoing transfers and transitions of unbound matter rather than its monumental hoarding. While none of these rehearsals “solve the problem” of white supremacist neoliberalism, they permit practitioners to meaningfully engage with decoloniality in material, experiential, and intuitive ways and, with hope, encourage the emergence of a shared consciousness that turns away from dispossession and toward the circulation of care.

Young children's adaptive partner choice in cooperation and competition contexts.

Choosing adequate partners is essential for cooperation, but how children calibrate their partner choice to specific social challenges is unknown. In two experiments, 4- to 7-year-olds (N = 189, 49% girls, mostly White, data collection: 03.2021-09.2022) were presented with partners in possession of different positive qualities. Children then recruited partners for hypothetical tasks that differed with respect to the quality necessary for success. Children and the selected partner either worked together toward a common goal or competed against each other. From age 5, children selectively chose individuals in possession of task-relevant qualities as cooperative partners while avoiding them as competitors. Younger children chose partners indiscriminately. Children thus learn to strategically adjust their partner choice depending on context-specific task demands and different social goals.

Sodomy, Possessive Individualism, and Godless Nature: Eighteenth-Century Traces of Homosexual Assertiveness

Sodomy, Possessive Individualism, and Godless Nature: Eighteenth-Century Traces of Homosexual Assertiveness

Regeneration Through Acquisition: Undoing the Pastoral in Sam Peckinpah’s The Ballad of Cable Hogue

The article explores the deconstructive use of the pastoral in Sam Peckinpah’s film The Ballad of Cable Hogue (1970). The film is singular in how closely it recreates the pastoral configuration of space as described in Leo Marx’s “Pastoralism in America.” However, Peckinpah evokes pastoral images and sentiments in order to raise questions about the validity of the pastoral as an entrenched American symbolic narrative in the face of specific contextual factors, especially possessive individualism as an important manifestation of transactional relations in capitalism. By constructing a metaphor of the exploitation of nature by man, Peckinpah addresses, even if by way of implication, the issue of ecological consciousness.

Deplatforming “the people”: media populism, racial capitalism, and the regulation of online reactionary networks

This essay contributes to a materialist theory of media populism by criticizing America First, an influential U.S. American reactionary live-stream hosted by Nicholas J. Fuentes, and its Groyper fans. Fuentes has expanded his online presence despite the deplatforming, or administrative suspension, of his social media accounts on account of his antisemitic, antiblack, and sexist hate speech. To understand the ideological ramifications of deplatforming populist influencers, I read clips from America First into the economic and infrastructural context of U.S. far-right subcultures. I argue that media studies must attend to bourgeois digital platform management as a technology which reproduces the undemocratic conditions of racial capitalism. The deplatforming of Fuentes facilitates the ascent of reactionary populism by reinforcing possessive individualism, or a white masculine fantasy of unmediated access to the public. “The people” of populism functions as media whose lost presence naturalizes sovereign violence against marginalized people. Media populism illustrates the need for to move beyond the dichotomy of “mainstream” versus “fringe” platforms to consider the material affinity of bourgeois digital publics and white nationalist provocation.

Inalienable Dignity: Writing Counterhegemonic Universal Human Rights Histories

Abstract Human rights doctrine is founded on a notion of universality and inalienability. However, critics of the dominant formulation of “universal” human rights claim that it privileges Western epistemology and does not adequately reflect the histories and lived experiences of Indigenous communities. This has prompted calls for a more inclusive conceptualization and theorization of human rights that takes equal account of Indigenous histories and rights traditions. This article makes a case for reconceptualizing universal human rights to reflect the epistemologies of historically marginalized communities. Drawing on debates in African history, it calls for a counterhegemonic approach to human rights that goes beyond possessive individualism and the neoliberal, state-centered rights model. To be truly universal, international human rights must take equal account of the communal and collectivist ethos that underpins Indigenous notions of human dignity.

Sodalism as Open Worldview: Conspiring to Dismantle the White Franchise

Sodalism as Open Worldview: Conspiring to Dismantle the White Franchise

Transitions and Intersections between Communalism and Possessive Individualism in Rural Fiji: Repercussions for Responding to Climate Change

Indigenous Fijian traditions that are embedded within rural traditions of the vakavanua and the moral economy are often cited as exemplars of social protection and social resilience by the wider climate adaptation community. Recent ethnographic studies have, however, highlighted tensions created by the capitalist cash economy, which promotes individualism over other forms of engagement in the market. Accordingly, this article aims to examine these tensions to identify the consequences for responses to ongoing climate change, arguing that there are other forms of capitalism that blend components of the moral economy with capitalist cash economies. I have referred to these forms of sociality, marketisation, and capitalism as possessive communalism in recognition of the prioritising of sociocentric values and rural traditions of social protection. I argue that it is important for aid organisations and governmental programmes to recognise and support these diverse forms of capitalism that retain traditional values and practises.

The Digital Calculus of Racial Capitalism

The Digital Calculus of Racial Capitalism

The Tragic Pragmatism of the Wagner Act

Abstract The Wagner Act established a right to collective action as the keystone of industrial democracy. In doing so, it also articulated a radical conception of the self: that individuals form genuine desires and attain full self-actualization through collective action. This conception ran counter to the traditional liberal idea of selfhood, which took possessive individualism as the fundament of democratic governance. This paper places the Wagner Act and its reception in the context of changing conceptions of the self in American political thought from 1920 to 1950. The Wagner Act derived its conception of democratic activity from a pragmatist and progressivist theory of the “social self.” But its reception took place amidst a very different intellectual context. By midcentury, a liberal hostility to “mass society” and its deleterious effects on individual choice had repudiated the older pragmatist collectivism. In other words, the Act’s core provision—the notion of collective action as central to the formation of workers’ individual desires—was born of a dying moment in American thought. The immediate hostility that the new labor law regime faced in Congress and the courts was a consequence, in part, of that disjuncture.

The Rhetoric of Corporate Psychopathy: Neoliberalism, Personhood, and Demonization in The Corporation

ABSTRACT In this essay I turn to the world-renowned book and film The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Power and Profit by Joel Bakan in order to conceptualize and critique what I label the rhetoric of corporate psychopathy. Doing so, I advance two interrelated claims: first, that neoliberalism’s rhetorical force is derived primarily from its extension and alteration of liberal notions of possessive individualism into a dispositif of corporate personhood. Second, I claim that Bakan’s argument that corporations are psychopaths—and his larger rhetoric of corporate psychopathy—ultimately reinscribes rather than challenges the disciplinary functions of liberal discourse in interesting ways. Thus, while the rhetoric of corporate psychopathy is an easily digestible line of argument that offers a ready-made case against corporate personhood and rights it is an argument against corporate personhood that those who oppose corporate power ought to reconsider.

Alessandro Manzoni’s Historical Works: Passionate Immunity and the Limits of the Dialectic

The free movement of viral matter—whether biological or ideological—threatens the free movement and total control of the liberal, humanist, white-propertied-male individual. I highlight this tension as exhibited in Alessandro Manzoni’s the Promessi sposi and the Storia della Colonna Infame, and set it alongside ongoing legacies of misogyny and racism, which facilitate  economic determinism under global capitalism by dissolving social bonds. I complicate Fredric Jameson’s assertions of Manzoni’s latent agitation for change, which he discovers in the latter’s recourse to a Manichean worldview in the Promessi sposi, by pointing to the exclusionary patterns in Manzoni’s organizing schemes. In particular, I examine how in both the Promessi sposi and the Storia della Colonna Infame, the category of “woman” is inserted, sacrificially, to close the gap of uncertainty pried open by the historical inquiry. I address how Manzoni’s advocacy for liberal, possessive individualism mismatches his notions around the necessarily “passionate” transmission of ideas from an author to a reader; and how his purported interest in reanimating history is curbed by a manifest fear of la folla—of bodies in public, in proximity, that are therefore vulnerable to contagion and the violation of “individuality.” I relocate the problem of sameness that Manzoni warns about, to the limits of the dialectic: its exclusionary structure that always regathers itself into a single, ascendant line, incapable of accommodating difference. Reading between different lines than Jameson, then, I suggest that Lucia’s starkly other role to Renzo’s “self” in the Promessi sposi conveys a glimmer of a radically feminist political subjectivity.

Recovering Whiteness in Medical‐Restorative Rehab

We present an ethnography of a highly medicalized rehab for stably employed, non‐criminalized men in Minnesota—arguing that while its style of rehab is universalized in popular accounts, it actually represents a case of distinctly white, middle‐class self‐reinvention within the broader field of US addiction treatment. “Medical‐restorative rehab” at “Healing Bridges” offered Twelve‐Step treatment, popular addiction science, and medication‐based therapies to white suburbanites recovering from addiction. While many patients had engaged in substantial drug‐related crime, the program's location outside the carceral state shielded participants from the stigma of criminalization, enabling them to construct their recovery as “voluntary” and restoring the fusion of white masculinity with self‐controlled possessive individualism. Bridges naturalized patients' privileged social location as “treatment readiness”—mapping inner strength and willpower onto the white, middle‐class self. The program then worked to instill techniques of self‐management, convert addictions into productive pursuits, and regulate desires in an uncertain world. Despite Bridges' rhetoric of heroic hyper‐agency, self‐governance was heavily supported by pharmaceutical interventions, shifting stigmatized drug dependence to licit pharmaceutical dependency constructed as responsible self‐care. Our analysis extends the study of American rehab as an important institution for the reproduction of distinct classed, raced, and gendered constructions of self‐hood and agency.

Waking up from Delusion: Mindfulness (Sati) and Right Mind-and-Heart (Bodhicitta) for Educating Activists

In the face of current turbulent times including climate emergencies, species extinction, the erosion of democracy and the rise of authoritarianism—in short, a suffering world—the authors of this paper propose that education needs to be centrally an activist effort dedicated to healing and repairing the increasingly wounded and damaged world. To this end, this paper explores Buddhism as an educational program that centralizes a healing curriculum based on the understanding that healing comes from waking up from the delusion of possessive individualism (ego-selves) that gives rise to neoliberal capitalist societies. This delusion is the existential home of suffering. Waking up requires the disciplined effort of seeing through and past individualism to the workings of mutual causality within a universe of interconnection (Interbeing), such as ours. The mindfulness (sati) practice that the historical Buddha taught is such a form of mental discipline. Through the agentic cultivation of sati and subsequent remembrance of our inherent Interbeing, we can rediscover and rekindle the inherently enlightened mind of bodhicitta. This paper explores various psychological, sociocultural, ideological, and relational conditionings that act as barriers to seriously practicing mindfulness, including the currently popular conceptions of mindfulness in North America. While acknowledging that successful practice takes setting up the right conditions, our paper also delves into helpful and supportive conditions for mindfulness practice for activists, namely, ethical motivation and contemplative/healing emotions such as the Four Immeasurables.

Responsibility and Community: Narrating the Individual and the Collective in Pandemic Times

Abstract Epidemics are times of negotiation between the individual and the collective. The British realist novel, with its emphasis on possessive individualism, turns in the mid-nineteenth century to engage a larger population brought into view, in large part, by the emergence of statistical models of public health. Dickens is critically engaged in this process in Bleak House, which shows the difficulties of negotiating between the plot of individual agency and representing collective suffering and responsibility. Moreover, it highlights one of the major problems of defining such a collective. At a moment when Britons were beginning to understand themselves as part of a worldwide system, specifically in the light of pandemics such as cholera, what is the definition of the society to which one belongs and has responsibility? Dickens reaches for inclusion in his insistence on the linkage between events and bodies in England, but does so in part by implying that other, racialized, bodies – in Borrioboola-gha for example – are beyond that collective and its concerns. In so doing, he appeals to the notion of an ethnically coherent nation-state that was gaining ground in the period. Now we, supposedly beyond the nation-state model, find that we must think about global community within the terms of COVID-19 (and climate change) – precisely when regressive fantasies of the self-enclosed, homogenous nation are being peddled by some of the most politically reactionary governments the West has seen in many decades. This essay uses Dickens to think about the problems and opportunities of representing our global interdependence.

The generalized exchange framework: A guide for managing norms in traditional & non-traditional markets

ABSTRACT While the sharing literature makes claims of uniqueness relative to traditional markets, we show how any market can be understood by positioning salient actors in terms of social distance, and understanding the degree of mutuality in their norms. We introduce the Generalized Exchange Framework, which offers a theoretically rigorous model for understanding and managing any market. An ethnographic study of the craft beer industry illustrates elements of both mutuality and possessive individualism, highlighting normative structures influencing actors in firms‘ environments. We offer managerial implications based on an understanding of the degree to which industry actors value mutuality to differing degrees.