Poststructuralist Research Articles

70 Years' Planning Theory: A Post-postmodernist Perspective

This survey, a subjective critical review of ‘planning theory’ as it evolved since the mid- 20th century, has three parts. The first is a condensed account of the emergence of three distinct schools of thought: the radical-communicative, post-structuralist, and institutionalist streams. In the second part each stream is represented reviewing a typical book: Friedmann’s (2011) Insurgencies, Gunder and Hillier’s (2009) Planning in Ten Words or Less, and Webster and Lai’s (2003) Property Rights, Planning and Markets. The last part argues the author’s position - there is no ‘planning’, only diverse planning practices - and develops its implications for planning theory and practice. Questo articolo e una rassegna critica della ‘teoria della pianificazione’ cosi come si e evoluta dalla meta del ventesimo secolo. E diviso in tre parti. La prima parte e un resoconto condensato dell’emergenza di tre diverse scuole di pensiero: la prospettiva comunicativa, quella post-strutturalista e quella istituzionalista. Nella seconda parte, per ognuna delle precedenti prospettive, viene preso in considerazione un testo tipico, rispettivamente: «Insurgencies» di J. Friedmann, «Planning in Ten Word or Less» di M. Gunder e J. Hillier, «Property Rights, Planning and Markets» di C. Webster e L.W.C. Lai. Nella terza e ultima parte viene presentata la posizione di chi scrive - non esiste ‘la pianificazione’, ma solo diverse pratiche di pianificazione - e ne vengono sviluppate le implicazioni teoriche e pratiche.

Piketty’s Capital: 21st-Century Gravitational Force?

In his Capital of the Twenty-First Century, Thomas Piketty (2013) challenges the claim that the workings of capitalism in the West accord with the principles of equality and opportunity in a democratic society. Composed as much in the style of history as economics, what explains the appeal of this very long, carefully drafted and technically dense text? This review is woven of three threads: the method of research behind it; its fit with theory and practice in the critical social sciences; and what it exemplifies about the ambiguity of leaping from a science laboratory into the world of revolutionary praxis. To close, the European project of economic management will be briefly discussed, suggesting in reference to both French regulation theory and German Ordoliberalism why the recent Nobel Prize in Economics, which many consider Piketty’s work to merit, was lost in favor of another French economist, Jean Tirole.

Prasmės (de)konstravimas per aktoriaus ir veikėjo (re)prezentaciją Gintaro Varno režisūroje

Šio straipsnio tikslas – išanalizuoti ir įvertinti, kaip konstruojama ar dekonstruojama prasmė režisieriaus Gintaro Varno pastatymuose per aktoriaus ir veikėjo (re)prezentaciją. Rašant šį darbą buvo derinta naratologinė analizė ir lyginamasis metodas, o struktūralizmo ir postruktūralizmo teorijos ir jų sampratos buvo pasitelktos formuojant šiam tyrimui teorines prieigas.Tyrimo eigoje išryškėjo, kad Gintaro Varno darbuose aktoriaus funkcija yra tradicinė – jis turi sukurti fikcinį personažą, kuris yra spektaklio prasminio sluoksnio dalis. Tačiau pagrindinis veikėjas šio režisieriaus pastatymuose paprastai vaizduojamas kaip nevienalypė asmenybė. Be to, veikėjo daugialypumą aktoriui kartais padeda išreikšti kitos priemonės, pavyzdžiui, gali būti kuriamas intensyvus dialogas tarp aktoriaus vaidybos ir vaizdo projekcijų.Pastebėta, kad aktoriams Gintaro Varno spektakliuose dažnai tenka manipuliuoti skirtingais pasakojimo lygmenimis ir kurti „teatrą teatre“. Tokiu būdu aktoriai Gintaro Varno pastatymuose pasakojimą konstruoja pasitelkdami ne tik diegetišką mimezę, bet ir jos kaitą. Taip pat aktoriai ir jų personažų vaizdavimas spektakliuose padeda sukurti tikroviškumo ir sapniškumo susilietimus, itin svarbius šio režisieriaus kūryboje.Taigi per aktoriaus ir veikėjo (re)prezentaciją Gintaro Varno spektakliuose kuriami ir spektaklio darnumą palaikantys, ir kartu visumą išardantys elementai.

‘What Forced Men to Kill Their Own Kind in Religious Ceremonies’? Anthropology and Metaphysics of Sacrifice in the Work of Georges Bataille and René Girard

Traditionally used to designate bloody rituals practiced in so-called ‘primitive societies’, the notion of sacrifice is commonly understood as a strategic investment in which the renunciation of something valuable is compensated by a more advantageous return. Sharing such a functionalist perspective, social theorists describe sacrifice as a means to renewing social and/or religious bonds through the transgression of social and/or religious boundaries. However, social theorists do not explain why men need to renew such bonds – i.e. what lies behind the human desire to unite with the divine and why violence exists in the first place – and ultimately leave unresolved the question of sacrifice’s deep origins. This article examines how two French theorists, namely Georges Bataille and Rene Girard, attempt to overcome the theoretical constraints faced by their predecessors and offer an innovative answer to the question of sacrifice’s deep origins, providing Western functionalist sacrifice theories with an unprecedented depth. To read or download this article, please follow this link: http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1502384 DOI: 10.14324/111.2057-2212.053

Prawa a ideologia. Prawa jednostki z perspektywy krytycznej myśli prawniczej i społecznej (wybrane zagadnienia)

Problematyka praw jednostki jest ewidentnie fundamentalnym zestawem zagadnień dla nowoczesnej myśli społecznej i prawniczej. Tryumf tej problematyki można chyba nawet uznać za jeden z wyznaczników filozoficznej moderny. Mainstreamowe podejście do praw jednostki jest jednoznacznie optymistyczne i afirmatywne. Oto ludzkość, realizując Kantowski postulat sapere aude, odkryła/stworzyła i twórczo rozwija najlepszy w dziejach zestaw normatywnych wyznaczników funkcjonowania jednostek i grup. Autor przyjmuje całkowicie odmienną perspektywę. Celem tekstu jest generalizująca interpretacja wątków poświęconych prawom jednostki w krytycznej myśli prawniczej i społecznej. Tę ostatnią Autor rozumie jako zespół emancypacyjnych dyskursów, którego prawniczą lokalną odmianę stanowi ruch krytycznych studiów nad prawem, nie tylko w wydaniu amerykańskim, lecz także europejskim (rozmaite teorie gender i queer, teorie postkolonialne, socjologia krytyczna, teorie komunikacyjne, teorie posthumanistyczne). Bezpośrednia intertekstualna genealogia wielu reguł przyjmowanych przez te dyskursy sięga do tzw. French theory, czyli myśli francuskich poststrukturalistów, a zwłaszcza M. Foucaulta, oraz do programów teorii krytycznej Szkoły Frankfurckiej.

“Immanence: A Life…”: An Educational Formula?

Shortly before his death, Gilles Deleuze penned the rather enigmatic essay titled “Immanence: A Life...,” which became a kind of philosophical riddle. One of the most compelling attempts to come to terms with this riddle can be found in Giorgio Agamben’s essay titled “Absolute Immanence,”1 in which Agamben compares and contrasts Deleuze’s work with Michel Foucault’s “Life: Experience and Science.” Key to Agamben’s reading of these two texts is the philosophically provocative use of punctuation, and, in particular, the colon and the ellipsis. Indeed, Agamben immediately draws the reader’s attention to the peculiar use of punctuation in Deleuze’s title as the key to the riddle of life that both Deleuze and Foucault (in their unique ways) confronted before their respective deaths. Extending and in some sense intensifying the central claims about the relationship between life and immanence found in the concluding gestures of the two quintessential French theorists of the twentieth century, Agamben creates a rich ontology of the punctuation mark as a dislocating move in the history of thought — what might be referred to as a “punctology.”

Presentism and Eurocentricity in Cinema Studies: Material and Theoretical Constrictions

In recent decades, scholars in a variety of humanities fields have thoroughly interrogated the ways in which established critical practices and theoretical frameworks have reproduced paradigms of coloniality. Yet cinema studies lags in this initiative. This article examines how presentist tendencies in particular have contributed to the ongoing Eurocentrism of academic work on film, by focusing on the acute challenges of film preservation and access, and the persistent sway of French theory.

The Discursive Constitution of Ocean Sustainability

As part of a search for political responses to protect and conserve marine ecosystems, this study explores the discourse on ocean affairs with a special emphasis on the articulation of the concept of sustainability. Drawing on the discourse theory of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, it is argued that post structuralism offers important insights on the construction of the discourse on maritime-related affairs. The analysis shows that the discourse on ocean affairs is closely tied to the empty signifier “management”, while the analysis of the empty signifier “sustainability” confirms the traditional three dimensional structure comprising economic, social and environmental dimensions, supplemented by an institutional one. The article shows that the use of such signifiers is necessary to define sustainability in all its complexity. In this context, it is argued that Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse theory provides an approach to grasp the ambiguity of the concept of sustainability. It helps to explain the practice of institutions in rephrasing existing objectives and activities in compliance with sustainability without really changing their business as usual approach. The paper concludes with an estimation of how useful it is to adhere to sustainability in ocean affairs especially in view of the complexity, uncertainty and continuous change of marine ecosystems.

Post-structuralism and Eastern Epistemology: the Concordance in Discordance

The objective of this paper is to analyse the fascinating ties between German transcendental philosophy of the 19th century and the Upanishadic and Buddhist thought, and the myriad ways in which these ties bear upon later European philosophy. My paper argues that Arthur Schopenhauer's World as Will and Idea - which heavily draws upon the Upanishads and Buddhism-is the point of provenance of what I describe as a Genealogy of Thought in western philosophy. Therefore in this paper I trace the influence of Schopenhauer-and in turn that of the Upanishads and Buddhism - in the work of Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud and Jacques Derrida. These three thinkers are closely associated with the poststructuralist project. It is my contention that the antecedents of post structuralism can be discerned in the Upanishads and Buddhism. Many fundamental tenets of poststructuralist thought such as the deconstruction of binary opposites, the Heideggerian critique of presence and self, and non-linearity resonate certain key positions held by classical Indian philosophers. I further go on to argue that the genealogy of thought that I am tracing is at odds with what could be broadly described as traditional western metaphysics; that the influence of the Upanishads and Buddhism afforded the thinkers that I am discussing a critical reflection on western thought. For this reason postcolonial theorists such as Gayathri Spivak and Homi K. Bhabha freely avail themselves of poststructuralist theory. This is because poststructuralist theory, as I argue in this paper, has its roots in the colonial encounter itself.

A Specter Is Haunting Germany--the French Specter of Milieu

Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, and Isabelle Stengers fought against a state-controlled form of science and saw “nomadic science/concepts” as a way to escape from it. The transnational history of the term milieu marks a good opportunity to contribute to another theory of nomadic vocabularies. Traveling from France to Germany, the word milieu came to be identified as a French theory. Milieu was seen as an expression of determinism, of the connection between the rise of the natural sciences and the rise of socialism, and it deterred the majority of German academics. Umwelt was thus coined as an “antimilieu” expression. This article defends a “transnational historical semantic” against the Koselleckian history of concepts and its a priori distinctions between words and concepts. Instead of taking its nature for granted, a transnational historical semantic investigation should analyze the terminological and national status given to the objects of investigation by the term's users.

Review: Architecture of the Sacred: Space, Ritual, and Experience from Classical Greece to Byzantium by Bonna D. Wescoat and Robert G. Ousterhout, eds.

Bonna D. Wescoat and Robert G. Ousterhout, eds. Architecture of the Sacred: Space, Ritual, and Experience from Classical Greece to Byzantium Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012, 416 pp., 151 b/w illus. $103 (cloth), ISBN 9781107008236 For the French theorist and historian of religion Mircea Eliade, hierophany is the physical manifestation of the sacred in an object. The transfigured object is thus imbued with sacral significance yet retains its connection to materiality by remaining an object in the physical world.1 Although Eliade primarily had in mind natural objects like stones and trees (Moses’s burning bush, for example), it is not difficult to see how built forms fit into his rubric. Indeed, given its inherent multiplicity and absence of singular meaning, architecture is well suited to elision with the sacred, particularly when “the sacred” is understood in terms of ritual activity and experience. Architecture of the Sacred: Space, Ritual, and Experience from Classical Greece to Byzantium , edited by Bonna Wescoat and Robert Ousterhout, illuminates the nature of this relationship through twelve wide-ranging and thought-provoking chapters, along with a preface and an afterword. The overarching thrust of the volume is articulated early on by the editors when they note that the built environment is no mere setting or framework within which ritual activity occurs but rather “the architectural setting [functions as] an active agent in the ritual process” (xxiii). This emphasis on the centrality of architecture to the human experience of the sacred grounds the essays of the volume in the spatiotemporal demands of ritual activity and also permits a relative degree of flexibility in terms of analytical and interpretive approach. Within this malleable framework, however, the built environment almost always takes center stage in a way that refreshingly inverts the typical treatment of architecture as handmaiden to ritual. The balance of this relationship is taken up in the first chapter, “Material Culture and Ritual: State of the Question,” wherein Jaś Elsner emphasizes the general problems in scholarship on the built environment and ritual, particularly the—perhaps …

Shareholder existence: on the turn to numbers in recent French theory

This essay takes stock of recent tendencies in French theory (from Alain Badiou and Quentin Meillassoux to Bruno Latour, Frédéric Gros, and Luc Boltanski) that focus on the metaphysics of financialisation. The notion of shareholder existence, drafted from Gros' book on ‘the security principle', emphasises how experience has become comparable to an investment, stock option, or credit swap. This condition exceeds the familiar notion of the self-interested individual who is constantly on the lookout to extract money, social capital, or power through political manoeuvring. The shareholder exceeds the character of the Machiavellian schemer, à la Frank Underwood in House of Cards, who, by dint of cunning and calculated risk, becomes lethally adept at turning political setbacks to personal advantage. Shareholder existence is modelled on the well-managed investment portfolio, in which the subject is at once the resource to be invested and the accounts manager of the resource. By way of Meillassoux's reading of Mallarmé's Coup de dés, the essay argues that the critique of this phenomenon points to theories of unaccountable experience as the basis for a new existentialism.

(Asian Studies + Anthropocene)4

In his Jungian-inspired utopianism, Joseph Campbell (1988, 32) once declared that the famous “Blue Marble” shot of earth from space (see figure 1) could potentially become a symbol of a new mythology that celebrated our common humanity. Of course, much as Jung and other universalizing theorists have been laid to rest over the last quarter-century by poststructural, postmodern, and postcolonial thought, so too apparently has any new mythology of our common humanity (much less its actualization). Nevertheless, one can certainly wonder whether Campbell would not have interpreted the Anthropocene as the perfect myth for forging a new vision of our shared humanity.

Ethics and politics after post-structuralism: Levinas, Derrida, Nancy

Ethics and politics after post-structuralism: Levinas, Derrida, Nancy

Историко-герменевтический очерк философии Фальсафа на примере «княжьих зерцал» («насихат аль мулюк») Абу Хамида Мухаммада аль-Газали ал-Туси: история и методология

A hermeneutic analysis of the Oriental Philosophers’ writings is invariably a matter of great challenge and difficulty. It is always full of allegory and literary divagations which intersperse a smooth flow of argumentation. This paper is written by Marklen Konurbaev, Professor of Literature at Moscow State University and his son, Salavat, a student of Arabic Philosophy. The paper consists of six parts and attempts to reveal the hidden message of a famous extract from the renowned book Ihya Ulum Al Din by a Persian philosopher Ghazālī, Abu Ḥamid Muḥammad Ibn Muḥammad Al-Tūsī, devoted to the analysis of the notion of «fairness» in the doings of a ruler. The hermeneutic analysis was performed based on the methodology propounded by Roland Gérard Barthes — a French literary theorist, philosopher, linguist and critic. This is the first ever attempt to put together the methodological efforts of a Western scholar and profoundly oriental piece of philosophy. Results of the hermeneutic study are stunning and elucidating. The paper could be recommended to the students of literature and philosophy at the universities and colleges.

Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability

Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability

Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Contemporary Thought: Revisiting the Horror with Lacoue-Labarthe ed. by Nidesh Lawtoo (review)

Reviewed by: Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Contemporary Thought: Revisiting the Horror with Lacoue-Labarthe ed. by Nidesh Lawtoo Yael Levin Lawtoo, Nidesh , ed. Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Contemporary Thought: Revisiting the Horror with Lacoue-Labarthe. London : Bloomsbury , 2012 . 256 pp. Paperback. Nidesh Lawtoo’s volume is an exciting and provocative return to Conrad’s most celebrated work. This is no mean feat. The difficulties underlying any scholarly approach to such a critically overdetermined work of literature are seemingly insurmountable. J. Hillis Miller, one of the contributors to this new volume, already pondered the merit of such an exercise in “Should We Read Heart of Darkness?” (2002). That Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Contemporary Thought is no less than an informative and thought-provoking contribution to scholarship on Conrad’s novella is thus a true accomplishment. The book’s raison d’être already serves to distinguish it from existing volumes on Heart of Darkness; the volume centers not on Conrad’s novella but on Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe’s response to the novella, an essay that is here translated and introduced to the English public for the first time. Though he is very much in the company of many central figures of French theory who enjoy wide theoretical appeal today, Lacoue-Labarthe may be less known to English speakers. Lawtoo presents him as one of the founding figures of mimetic theory, an authority on what Lacoue-Labarthe himself terms “the metaphysics of the modern.” The philosopher is introduced through a variety of registers ranging from the literary-philosophical to the biographical. Miller’s essay “Heart of Darkness Revisited” offers an astute response to Lacoue-Labarthe’s reading of Conrad; Lawtoo sketches a brief philosophical introduction to his central ideas, and François Warin, a friend of the late philosopher, offers a more personal glimpse of their shared tour of Africa. An interview with Avital Ronell, a former student of the philosopher, concludes the volume with a brief dialogue that shuttles between the conceptual to the private whereupon Lacoue-Labarthe is revealed as a modest but exacting thinker. Though it may initially raise questions, the decision to withhold the philosopher´s essay to page 111 emerges as a strategic choice on the editor’s part. By postponing our encounter with the philosopher, Lawtoo stages a mirroring of Marlow’s journey down the river in search of Kurtz’s elusive voice. Our experience of Lacoue-Labarthe is similarly mediated throughout a large part of this journey of discovery. If Lacoue-Labarthe materializes as the heart of the volume, much as Kurtz provides the elusive center of Conrad’s text, the two assume the guise of doubles in Warin’s short essay. The masks of primitive African art adorning the walls of the philosopher´s home, his multiple allegiances to the arts, philosophy, and politics—the parallels with Conrad’s story here appear to be greater than the sum of the stylistic repetition and the consequent irony cannot be overstated. Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Contemporary Thought is readable, accessible, and engaging. Offering an impressive array of critical thinkers including Claude Maisonnat and Stephen Ross, the volume also hosts a particularly rewarding return to the novella by Miller, one of the canonical voices comprising its contemporary critical corpus. Lawtoo’s volume allows for a rehearsal of some of the commonplaces of Heart of Darkness scholarship from Lacanian and Freudian psychoanalysis to the themes of myth and voice. At the same time, it contains new and provocative ideas on the novella’s place in the philosophical tradition and its relation to mimesis, emotion, and even X-ray technology. Warin’s description of the death rituals in Africa is also valuable in suggesting that the African woman’s inexplicable arm-raising gesture in Kurtz’s station [End Page 385] may be recuperated within such practices as a gesture of reverence. It is my contention, however, that the volume’s greatest achievement is in its manner of approaching Conrad’s novella performatively, through the mediation of Lacoue-Labarthe’s essay. In so doing, the volume offers the reader precisely that active reading experience we often forfeit when reading critical treatments of fiction...

Transgressive Truth Telling

Transgressive Truth Telling

The Discursive Constitution of the 'Management Control' Organisation

The idea of ‘management control’ regards stability within the organisational environment, in the sense of directing the behaviour of employees towards some set of ‘organisational’ objectives. More than a collection of managerial artefacts, however, this signifier labels a specific set of objects and practices, which typify a regime of practices ‘management control’ at the same time that they are driven, enabled and constrained by it. In this sense, diverse ‘organisation’-like social and political logics are materialised through these objects and practices and through the crystallised regime of practices, then being recognised as ‘management control’-like constitutive logics. Throughout the exercise of such logics – political institutions of social logics – a ‘management control’-like organisational discourse is constituted, hence constituting the ‘management control’-like ‘organisation’, then being experienced as a typical ‘management control’ organisation. The organisation – and the ‘management control’-like organisation – does not happen as a random phenomenon, but it happens out of the constitution of ‘management control’-like organisational discourse. The present thesis develops the arguments towards this essential description, working on post structuralist discourse theory and following a retroductive circle of problematisation, theory construction and persuasion/intervention for research in social sciences, willing to answer the research question regarding the dynamic whereby ‘management control’ logics are articulated and thus constitute contextually-specific organisational discourses. A case study has been developed at the Enterprise, a family-owned metallurgic business, and five theoretical contributions are then proposed, regarding the dynamic process of constituting the organisation, the conceptual difference between discourse theory and institutional theory, the powerful role of political actors for instituting, de-instituting and re-instituting social logics, the relevance of using management accounting artefacts as tools for materialising ‘management control’ social logics, and the materialisation of ‘management control’ like hegemonic discourse through the feedforward process with the articulation of the regime of practices.

The Embrace of Radical Philosophical Emptiness as a Liberating Conceptualization of Thought in Roland Barthes and Jean Baudrillard

Among the challenges of poststructuralist thought has been the demand that we acknowledge a kind of philosophical emptiness which many feel accompanies the perceived decline in foundationalist thought. By looking more closely at Barthes and Baudrillard’s writing on meaning, writing, language, truth, and the real, we can come to a better understanding of the emergence and implications of the poststructural challenge. The paper argues that Barthes’ and Baudrillard’s writing on these five key concepts can lead us to a more liberating conception of thought and contribute to our individual effort to become more challenging thinkers. This paper also (unavoidably) points to several points of convergence and divergence between Barthes and Baudrillard.