Sociopolitical Critique Research Articles

Thinking in Public with Rhetoric

Late in his career, Michel Foucault described himself as show[ing] people that they are much freer than they feel, that people accept as truth, as evidence, some themes which have been built up at a certain moment during history, and that this so-called evidence can be criticized and destroyed. To change something in the minds of people that's the role of an intellectual (1988,10). Being widely recognized as a public intellectual, Foucault fulfilled the rhetorical function of his role changing people's minds partly by connecting his political activity in nonacademic settings with the research he did as an academic scholar and theorist. In the same interview, after emphasizing that all of us are living and thinking subjects, Foucault went on to lament the gap between social history and the history of ideas. Social historians are supposed to describe how people act without thinking, and historians of ideas are supposed to describe how people think without acting (14). In declaring that a historian of thought attempts to bridge this gap, Foucault states his goal as a specific academic intellectual, as the Professor of the History of Systems of Thought at the College de France.1 Academic intellectuals speak and write primarily for the professional dis ciplinary communities with which they identify. In contrast, public intellectuals not only rhetorically engage audiences beyond the academy but are recognized as doing so by both academics and nonacademics. As the example of Foucault demonstrates, academic intellectuals can become public intellectuals. Some of these hybrids build on their disciplinary expertise in making their public interventions (e.g., the literary cultural critic Edward Said), while others tend to separate their principal disciplinary work from their sociopolitical criticism in the larger public sphere (e.g., the linguist Noam Chomsky). The preceding paragraph illustrates one way the terms academic intel lectuals and public intellectuals get deployed within discussions inside and outside the university.2 I find these definitions useful for understanding the similarities and differences among persons thinking publicly in various cultural

Psychotherapy and ‘ethical sensibility’: towards a history of criticism

This paper makes a case for what it understands to be the ethical imperative underwriting the need to revisit select historical criticisms of psychotherapy. Three broad areas of historical criticism seem particularly pressing in this respect: socio-political critiques, feminist critiques, and concerns over the potentially abusive nature of the transference. The first set of arguments concerns a series of speculations over how psychotherapy may act as an instrument of social control, as a de-politicizing and potentially ‘pathologizing’ vehicle able to implement normative (or ideological) socio-political values through its clinical procedures. The second set of arguments focuses on psychotherapy's gendering potential, that is, both its construction of gender and its reiteration of patriarchal power-relations. The third focus of the paper brings to the fore questions of the frequently sexualized nature of the psychotherapeutic interaction, particular with reference to the transference. The paper concludes by...

Conflicts of Interest over the Wadi Rum Reserve: Were They Avoidable? A Socio-Political Critique

Resume La reserve du Wadi Rum. Les conflits d'interet etaient-ils inevitables? Une critique socio-politique Au Moyen-Orient, les projets de protection de l'environnement appliquent-ils les principes de participation des populations locales et de co-gestion des ressources naturelles? Les differentes parties sont-elles capables de developper une relation de confiance et de cooperer dans la planification et la realisation de projets qui soient economiquement soutenables? La reponse est negative si l'on en juge par l'exemple de la reserve du Wadi Rum en Jordanie oh un volet tourisme a engendre un intense conflit d'interets entre la communaute bedouine locale et les agences chargees de la raise en oeuvre. Cet article developpe l'argument selon lequel le conflit etait inevitable car la question de l'implication des communautes locales n'a ete envisagee que sous l'angle socio-economique, et car planificateurs et maitres d'oeuvre ont privilegie une approche par le haut. Les communautes locales en ont ete marginalisees et leur pouvoir de decision affaibli. Elles ont reagi en faisant obstruction a certaines mesures de protection de l'environnement auxquelles elles n'etaient pas opposees en principe. Les institutions supranationales qui financent les projets de protection de l'environnement ont developpe des mecanismes visant limiter les effets dommageables de ces projets sur les populations locales, tout particulierement dans des contextes politiques autoritaires. Au Moyen-Orient, les directives relatives aux populations autochtones devraient etre appliquees certains groupes bedouins ruraux. Alors seulement on pourra considerer que la region est en phase avec les dernieres tendances socio-economiques en matiere de protection de l'environnement. Resumen La reserva de Wadi Rum. ?Eran los conflictos de intereses inevitables? Una critica socio-politica ?En Oriente Medio, aplican los proyectos de proteccion del medio ambiente los principios de participacion de las poblaciones locales asi como los principios de co-gestion de los recursos naturales? ?Son capaces los distintos interesados, institucionales y los de las bases, de desarrollar una relacion de confianza y de cooperar al planificar y realizar proyectos de conservacion economicamente sostenibles? A juzgar por el ejemplo de la reserva de Wadi Rum en Jordania donde una seccion turismo provoco un conflicto de intereses intenso entre la comunidad beduina local y las agencias encargadas de la implementacion, la respuesta es negativa. Este articulo sostiene que este conflicto era inevitable porque la question de la implicacion de las comunidades locales no fue abordada mais que desde el punto de vista socio-economico y porque los planificadores asi como los que pusieron en practica esta implementacion adoptaron un metodo por lo alto. Por haber dejado de lado el aspecto politico y cultural del proyecto de conservacion, las comunidades locales fueron puestas al margen de la sociedad y despojadas de sus derechos, Estas reaccionaron dificultando medidas de proteccion alas que, en principio, no se oponian. Las instituciones supranacionales que finanzan los proyectos de proteccion han desarrollado mecanismos que pretenden limitar los efectos adversos de estos proyectos sobre las poblaciones locales, particularmente en contextos politicos autoritarios. En Oriente Medio, las lineas directrices acerca de las poblaciones autoctonas deberian ser aplicadas a ciertos grupos beduinos rurales. Una vez este hecho realizado, podra considerarse que la region sintoniza con las altimas tendencias socio-economicas en materia de proteccion medioambiental. ********** As far as the socio-political implications of environmental conservation projects are concerned, the Middle East is very much a blind spot of research, probably because state-sponsored conservation attempts are relatively new in the region, the earliest ones dating back to the 1970s. …

I’Ve Got Conceptual Art in my Identity Politics

MEDI(t)Ations: Adrian Piper's Videos, Installations, Performances, and Soundworks 1968-1992 The Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) at California Plaza August 6-November 5, 2000 San Diego, California New Museum of Contemporary Art New York, New York October 4, 2001-January 13, 2002 There was once a television commercial for Reese's Peanut Butter Cups that explained the genesis of the product by showing a collision between a jar of peanut butter and a bar of chocolate. The ad acknowledged the individual deliciousness of peanut butter and chocolate while arguing the merits of a union between these two great tastes. One could make an analogous point concerning production associated with and politics. The dry wit and almost puritanical anti-visuality that characterized the linguistic, mathematic, philosophical and phenomenological investigations associated with the conceptual of the late '60s represents, in part, a grand if futile gesture of protest against the excesses of the decade's market and the vacuous opticality of high modernist painting and pop art. The wide range of practices that have become subsumed under the label furthered conceptual art's attack on modernism: feminist art's privileging of women's lived experienc e in the face of the hostility or indifference of the world of the '70s; the response by gay artists during the '80s to the rapidly escalating health and political crisis of AIDS; the bluntly critical work by artists of color that touched off a critical conflagration in the wake of the 1993 Whitney Biennial. In sum, is shorthand for produced after 1970 that foregrounds the connection of racial, class and sexual subjectivity to the institutions and processes of power: when we think of work informed by a politics of identity we typically think of passionate declaration of the personal or scathing socio-political critique. Implicitly or explicitly, art is informed by the body of the maker or the subject of its investigation. Conceptual art, on the other hand, remains strictly anti-body: its text-based works and deadpan photographs serve as the almost reluctant traces of intellectual engagement. To return to the Reese's analogy, the separate tastes of conceptual and an informed by a politics of identity have much individual merit, but what do we get when they collide? We get that is passionately committed to articulating people's lived experience yet spare, even self-effacing, in its appearance. Since the late '70s, Adrian Piper's practice has deliberately melded the forms of '60s conceptualism and minimalism with identity based subject matter. An active participant in the New York conceptual scene of the late '60s, Piper began in 1970 to intervene in the social sphere with Catalysis, a series of unannounced street performances that tested passersby's responses to a disruptive presence. The anti-social actions of Catalysis ranged from Piper riding the bus with a towel stuffed in her mouth to roaming a department store while wearing clothes that reeked of noxious substances. Originally intended by the artist as an apolitical sociological investigation, Catalysis nonetheless began to nudge Piper into an increasing awareness of her subjectivity in relation to her art. In her 1973-75 series Mythic Being she continued to explore the divisive relationship between self and other. By the end of Mythic Being, Piper began to connect her investigations of alienation to her experience as an A frican American, a minority presence in academia and the world. Using a wide range of media, Piper is particularly well-known for minimal video and installation works that engage with issues relating to race. This term encompasses a wide variety of complex ideas, social and cultural practices, and histories specific to the identity and subjectivity of black (and white) people in a society controlled by a white power structure. …

The Transformation of Authorship in America.

Most critics and historians consider that the emergence of a free press liberated 18th century American authors. In this study, the author seeks to overturn this view, arguing that the emergence of economic liberalism transformed American authorship into a market-oriented profession. Rice argues that the lapse of Puritan censorship, the consolidation of copyright law, and the explosion of a commercial print culture confronted writers in the United State with a striking predicament - the depoliticization and commodification of public expression. He seeks to show that the rigorous censorship practised by Puritan authorities conferred an implicit prestige on texts as civic interventions, helping to foster an indigenous tradition of sociopolitical criticism. With special attention to the sudden emergence of the novel in post-revolutionary America, Rice reveals how the emergence of economic liberalism undermined the earlier tradition of political writing by transforming American authorship from an expression of individual civic conscience to a market-oriented profession. The text includes discussions of the writings of Benjamin Franklin, Michel-Guillaume-Jean de Crevecoeur and Hugh Henry Brackenridge.

Rousseau's Legacy: Emergence and Eclipse of the Writer in France

Rousseau's Legacy is an original and ambitious work of literary scholarship that focuses on the emergence with Rousseau of a new and influential paradigm of the writer who brings together revolutionary sociopolitical critique and 'confessionalism'. Combining a wide-ranging knowledge of contemporary theory with an informed interest in sociopolitical context and cultural history, the author goes on to explore the persistent importance of the Rousseauist paradigm through the close reading of works by a number of major French writers from Stendahl to Duras, Althusser, and Foucault.

Marketing Insults: Wyndham Lewis and the Arthur Press

Many of modernist writers had to resort to unusual measures to publish and distribute their work. While publishing history of works that came to dominate academic canon of twentieth-century English literature is fairly well known, that of failures is not. Probably strangest case of modernist independent publishing, and most spectacular failure in comparison to its ambitions, is Wyndham Lewis's 1930 satire The Apes of God. The publication and publicity campaign of this novel make an especially interesting study of role of private patronage and self-promotion in modernist movement because novel's subject is these very phenomena and Lewis's handling of affair recapitulated issues that novel explores. Like much experimental writing, book was too dense and idiosyncratic for a wide audience; its satiric venom also made it unpalatable for many capable of understanding it. Its additional liability was that it denounced literary world from which it needed support, and this handicap led Lewis into some unusual publicity tactics. His marketing strategy included making very economical use of satiric victims of this roman clef, some of whom were his former patrons. He sold them an expensive collector's edition, used them to promote it, and, during novel's scandalized reception, blamed them publicly for unfavorable reactions, always maintaining that he had not written about them. In addition, he impersonated his fictitious publisher to assemble a record of scandal, pamphlet Satire & Fiction, in order to prove that it was really he who was being maligned; and in its title essay he formulated a theory of scientific satire, based on an external method opposed to modernist impressionism, that would absolve him from charges of personal malice. In this ploy he re-enacted roles of two of Apes's main characters and surreptitiously confirmed contradictions of Apery that novel unmasks. The outcome, like failure of his hero's confidence game, typified unhappy fate of reputation of modernism's self-proclaimed internal Enemy. Although this episode presents a striking instance of satiric paranoia, it is more than a study in psychopathology. Apes is Lewis's most controversial work of fiction; it exemplifies factors that have consigned writer whom T. S. Eliot called the greatest prose master of style of my generation (526) to a secondary place in movement that he had helped to create. Although most of Lewis's critics concede that novel contains some of his most brilliant writing, few consider it among his best work overall; most follow Hugh Kenner's view of it as a dead end, extremity of his puppet-fiction (97), and also discount its topicality and strident antihumanism. It is true that it is an uneven, daunting work, a wild ream of sarcasm; but it is less unreadable than some modernist classics, and subtlety of its design has not been appreciated. It was a dead end for Lewis partly because it was a relative failure commercially, and it was a failure partly because in his overzealous promotion he actually hindered its distribution and directed critical discussion toward narrow aspects of it as well. But Apes is of great aesthetic as well as historical interest; indeed, its artistic achievement cannot be separated from its sociopolitical critique of modernist movement. Lewis turned Joyce's and Eliot's mythic method upon contemporary avant-garde itself and produced a prophecy of mass culture. The marketing of book adds another paradoxical layer onto an already complex tale. Lewis intended Apes to rival both Ulysses and Proust's Recherche; he staked his career on it, and he was sorest of losers. This essay concerns peculiar way in which his promotion elaborated novel's drama, and it demonstrates how Lewis's own diabolical cleverness and pride contributed to his marginalization in literary history. …

Meditationes philosophicae de Deo, Mundo, Homine, and Meditationes, Theses, Dubia philosophico-theologica (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 311 centrality of antiabstractionism to his program. However, it appears that Muehlmann's stated goal of showing that Berkeley's idealism is well grounded (l 9) has not been met. The second half of the book focuses on a second puzzle: "How does Berkeley manage to convince himself that this astonishing thesis [idealism] can rest tensionless, or at least without contradiction, side by side with common-sense realism?" (3). Here, one might object that Muehlmann has overemphasized Berkeley's commitment to the dictates of common sense. Most of Berkeley's claims about the commonsensical nature of his philosophy are essentially comparative: his system is more commonsensical than materialism because it is not subject to a similar collapse into scepticism. Many of Berkeley's efforts to reconcile his system with the "plain man's view" appear simply to be damage control. However, Muehlmann provides a useful inventory of the resources Berkeley provides for accommodating realism and, when he finds them wanting, supplies an ingenious Berkeley-esque account of the nature of bodies and our perception of them, designed to secure realism. According to this account, bodies are constitutedby objective laws of nature, and our awareness of bodies is notional. Muehlmann argues that for this account to be workable, notions must be acts of the mind, distinct from their objects but intrinsically directed towards them, a conclusion that he suggests is incompatible with Berkeley's nominalism. The focus of the book is intentionally narrow, surveying only Berkeley's ontological views in the early (pre-i 714) works, and its treatments of Berkeley's attack on mechanism and his views on causation are disappointingly brief. However, Muehlmann mines Berkeley's philosophical notebooks to good effect, and packs his chapters with provocative theses, metaphysical analyses, and significant criticism of other commentators (sometimes to the point that the reader may temporarily lose sight of the central thread). Lls^ DowNInG University of Pennsylvania Theodor Ludwig Lau. MeditationesphilosophicaedeDeo,Mundo, Homine, and Meditationes, Theses, Dubia philosophico-theologica. Philosophische Clandestina der deutschen Aufkllirung. Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 199~. Pp. 378. Cloth, DM 245. Had Theodor Ludwig Lau published his Meditationes de Deo, Mundo, Homine (1717) a century earlier, he probablywould have suffered the same fate as Giordano Bruno or Giulio Cesare Vanini. But the righteous citizens of Frankfurt am Main contented themselves with execrating, confiscating, and burning Lau's little treatise and with banishing its author. In his introduction, Lau himself had foreseen the risks, yet proceeded to publish a scathing socio-political critique even as he sought employment with the new Elector of the Palatinate. Moreover, he afterwards submitted a somewhat disingenuous appeal of his condemnation to the faculty of the University at Halle, only to respond intemperately to their judgment. Two years later he published a second, no 312 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 32:9 APRIL 199 4 less obnoxious, if redundant, treatise, the Meditations, Theses, Dubia philosophicotheologica . Lau's treatises have now been reprinted as the first volume of the series "Philosophische Clandestina der deutschen Aufkl~irung," which will also include the clandestinely circulated works of Friedrich Wilhelm Stosch, Gabriel Wagner, Urban Gottfried Bucher and Johann Georg Wachter. Martin Pott, author of this volume's introduction, regards Lau as perhaps the most important of this group of freethinkers and seeks to rescue him from both contemporary and later misrepresentation, misinterpretation and neglect. Supporting documents include: the retraction exacted from Lau by the Consistory at K6nigsberg in 1728; Christian Thomasius's history of Lau's dealings with the University of Halle, Elender Zustand einesin dieAtheistereyverfallenenGelehrten;and a refutation of Lau's first treatise by the theologian Johann Konrad Arnold. By the standards of clandestine literature, Lau offers few original ideas? His materialist physics, belief in the plurality of worlds, rejection of the biblical account of the Creation and Fall, denial of the priority of Christianity, adoption of a pantheistic and deistic theology, and demands for a "rational" religion--these are all familiar motifs. His theories of religious impostorship and the political uses of religion had already been forcefully expressed and were being widely disseminated via the clandestine classic, The Treatiseof the ThreeImpostors. Lau's originality lies in how he embeds his socio...

Malaysia - Reflections of Change: Sociopolitical Commentary and Criticism in Malaysian Popular Music since 1950. By Craig A. Lockard. Published as a special issue of the journal Crossroads vol. 6, no. 1 (1991). Pp. 106. Notes, Index.

Malaysia - Reflections of Change: Sociopolitical Commentary and Criticism in Malaysian Popular Music since 1950. By Craig A. Lockard. Published as a special issue of the journal <i>Crossroads</i> vol. 6, no. 1 (1991). Pp. 106. Notes, Index.

The synthesis: A sociopolitical critique of the liberal professions

(1990). The synthesis: A sociopolitical critique of the liberal professions. Social Epistemology: Vol. 4, No. 2, pp. 229-258.

"'Tis Writ by Me": Massinger's "The Roman Actor" and the Politics of Reception in the English Renaissance Theatre

The political importance of theatre and spectacle in the English Renaissance has been well established.1 What remains unsettled, however, is the political role played by the drama. A number of critics have recently argued that, far from symbolically confirming political orthodoxy and reinforcing conformism, the drama radically opposed the Stuarts' claims to absolute sovereignty.2 Massinger's The Roman Actor has figured prominently in this view. Martin Butler and Annabel Patterson argue that Massinger intentionally revises the past to reflect topically the anxieties of the present. Despite censorship, readers could apply Massinger's play (and other drama as well) analogically, allegorize, and reencode it as a form of sociopolitical criticism ideologically aligned with Parliamentary and Puritan opposition to the monarchy.3