Jon Simons

Embodying Spirits of Resistance

There are revolutionary moments of politics that can be most appropriately described as spiritual moments. These are the moments when people are willing to risk their lives while resisting oppressive power. In this paper we address spirits of resistance in a general way, but also as manifested at particular moments in three contemporary resistance movements in England, India, and Palestine. Our intention is not to explain such moments, not to analyze the motivations of those involved, but to follow them in the fashion of nomadic science, critically drawing upon the work of Deleuze and Guattari. In our conclusion we argue that the value of spirits of resistance should be upheld in the face of intellectual strategies to tame them, as it is these moments that best guarantee freedom, whether or not resistance is ‘successful’ .

Ideology, imagology, and critical thought: The impoverishment of politics

The shift from ideological politics to politics dominated by the media is characterized by Kundera as the rise of imagology. In Habermass terms, imagology contributes to the systematic distortion of communication and impoverishes politics by undermining critical public reasoning. His view is shared by much recent research on the media and political communication. Deliberative democracy is proposed by Habermas and others as an antidote to imagology. This paper argues that the above line of reasoning errs by assuming that critical reasoning must take the form of verbal argumentation. This assumption leads commentators to over-emphasize the differences between systematic verbal presentation of ideas (ideologies) and visual and narrative representations (imagologies). Following Jameson and Hall, both forms can be understood as ideology in a Marxist sense. Rather than denigrating images as foreign to rational reflection, it is argued with reference to W. J. T. Mitchell that images are as amenable to critical interpretation as verbal argument.

Governing the Public: Technologies of Mediation and Popular Culture

Media technologies are an integral and vital element of democratic governance. The political public of representative democratic régimes are mediated publics, in that they exist and are constituted as publics through the mediation of technologies of mass media. The public sphere of democratic politics is part of, and central to, the mediated sphere of popular culture. There is a structural and necessary relation between the popularization of culture and the democratization of politics. A governmentalist approach understands political media technologies not as aberrations in the light of democratic theory but as the practices of “actually existing” representative democracy. Genuine popular democracy does not exist, fully formed, in the publics constituted by the media technologies but is most likely to flourish in popular culture and through media technologies.

Mediated Construction of the People: Laclau’s Political Theory and Media Politics

In his book On Populist Reason, Ernesto Laclau (2005) encapsulates his political theory up to that point, arguing that “populism is the royal road to understanding something about the ontological constitution of the political as such” (p. 67). By this he means that, through an understanding of the oft-denigrated phenomenon of populism, we can grasp some of the fundamental, discursive operations of all politics. The most crucial political operation is the discursive construction of the primary subject of modern politics, the people: “the political operation par excellence is always going to be the construction of a ‘people’” (p. 153). Thus, in Laclau’s view, all politics is populist, though some is more so than others (p. 154), because all politics partakes of the “social logic” of populism (p. xi). More precisely, Laclau means that populism is the political logic of democracy, which he regards as “the only truly political society” (Laclau, 2001, p. 10). Certainly, on the face of it, the demos or people must be central to any conception of democratic politics. And if, as Laclau holds, there is no political subjectivity prior to its discursive construction, then surely we must attend to the operation of that construction as the condition of possibility for democracy.

Aestheticisation of Politics: From Fascism to Radical Democracy

The “aestheticisation of politics”, a term coined by Walter Benjamin, refers to a critique of various modes of politics considered to be irrational in leftist, critical theory. The critique ties aestheticised politics to fascism and capitalism, thereby precluding the conceptual possibility of a radical democratic aesthetic politics. This paper challenges that position first by working through Wolfgang Welsch’s semantic clarification of the term “aesthetics”, then by deriving different senses of “aestheticised politics” from the range of meanings given by Welsch. A typology of aestheticised politics, from fascist to communist, depicts the conceptual possibility of a radical democratic political aesthetics.

from resistance to polaesthics: politics after foucault

Foucault consistently refused to place himself on the political mapl yet was actively engaged in a variety of political campaigns. So, he did position himself in opposition to certain (micro-) political arrangements, and thus cannot be regarded as a neutral commentator. In &dquo;The Subject and Power,&dquo;2 Foucault describes the sort of resistance he felt connected to as a series of local struggles which actually occur. These struggles are &dquo;refusals of what we are,&dquo; oppositions to forms of power which &dquo;subjectify,&dquo; i.e., make us subject to power relations while turning us into subjects, that is, agents of power relations.3 By combining these two aspects of subjectification [assujettissement] this form of power individuates us, constituting us according to categories of personality.

The Exile of Political Theory: the Lost Homeland of Legitimation

A sense of distance or exile is a recurrent theme of the literature in which the state of the political theory is either lamented or acclaimed. A review of these tales suggests that implicit definitions of the homeland of the sub-discipline as philosophical, practical or interpretive are inadequate, leading to mistaken diagnoses of the reasons for the ills or recovery of political philosophy. This paper argues that political theory has been exiled from its previous role or homeland of legitimation of political orders. Under contemporary conditions in the advanced liberal capitalist political order, in which a media-generated imagology of society as a communicative system fills the role of a legitimating discourse, political theory faces a legitimation crisis.

Benjamin’s communist idea: Aestheticized politics, technology, and the rehearsal of revolution

Recent interest in communism as an idea prompts reconsideration of Walter Benjamin’s conception of a “communist” aesthetic politics. In spite of Benjamin’s categorical condemnation of aestheticized politics, his “artwork essay” is better read as both explicit condemnation of a particular (regressive fascist) type of aestheticized politics and implicit commendation of another (progressive communist) type. Under the modern conditions of the technological reproducibility of art, and mass politics, the character of and relationship between the cultural value spheres of politics and aesthetics also changes. Benjamin analyzes dialectically the actuality of the fascist response to modern mass arts and politics in which technology and society are misaligned, and the potentiality of a communist response that would bring about a collective interplay of humanity and technology.

The Critical Force of Fictive Theory: Jameson, Foucault and Woolf

There is a widespread supposition that viable, oppositional or ‘leftist’ politics requires, as Nancy Fraser says, a ‘critical social science that would be as total and explanatorily powerful as possible’.4 Such a supposition underlies Papa’s insistence that his son Omar get a good education, an education that would show him who is being ‘shafted’ by contemporary capitalism, an education that is underwritten (financially) by former and current international divisions of labour. It is not only Spivak who would like to occupy the space of Papa the pedagogue, for whom knowledge rather than money is the key even for Pakistani immigrants in Thatcher’s ‘entrepreneurial society’. Fraser, along with other critical social scientists and theorists, among whom I would like to include myself, would like to know clearly what is being done and to whom in this world.

A Letter of Thanks to a Man of Letters: Mark Millington and Culture, Theory and Critique

To say that Culture, Theory and Critique was, in many respects, shaped by the research of Mark Millington is not an understatement, but it is a suggestion that needs some explanation, for how this could be so is not immediately apparent. Mark is a scholar of twentieth-century Latin American literature with an impressive publication record that has ranged across authors such as Borges, Cabrera Infante, Carpentier, Donoso, Fonseca, Fuentes, Gallegos, Garcı́a Márquez, Güiraldes, Onetti and Vargas Llosa, to name but a few. Culture, Theory and Critique, by contrast, is, as stated in the journal’s brief, an interdisciplinary journal for the transformation and development of critical theories in the humanities and social sciences that aims to critique and reconstruct theories by interfacing them with one another and by relocating them in new sites and conjunctures. If one were asked to guess how the agenda of the latter resulted from the research of the former, one might be tempted to think that the transformation and reconstruction of critical theories through relocation in new sites was simply the result of something that occurs quite naturally in postcolonial contexts and, perhaps, in Latin America more specifically. This is undoubtedly true, yet there is more to it than this. Indeed, in his self-description of his own research, Mark writes: ‘It is my conviction that critical work should focus on trying to understand the literary work in ways in which it cannot understand itself, in other words critical analysis must go beyond the text to grasp its conditions of possibility and its presuppositions’. It is this conviction that ultimately gave such direction and distinction to the journal under Mark’s gentle guidance, the idea that no text, literary or theoretical, can enact the work of criticism by itself, that a detailed analytical approach is necessary to enable any text to say what it has to say in its own and other contexts. What is laid out with this approach is an entire project, yet it is a project that can have no end, no finality. As Mark argued in his work on transculturation and hybridisation (around the very same time that these terms were being integrated into the journal’s brief), even if terms such as these appear to produce something that ‘does not fit within neat binaries, that . . . straddles, mixes and disrupts’, something that manifests a Culture, Theory and Critique, 2015 Vol. 56, No. 3, 263–265, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14735784.2015.1070977