Poststructuralism

The article is an introductory paper to a Special Issue in Moderna Språk that collects eight contributions focusing on demythologizations of cultural politics. Using Deleuzian concepts of minorization and delirium, the paper attempts to frame cultural difference in a new open terrain where all forms of localisms and regimes of identifications are seen as frames of capture that subjugate rather than emancipate difference. The measure of a culture’s health, I argue, does not reside in atrophy of its self-identity but in its dispersion of atoms everywhere, its schizoid states of intensities and deterritorializations where thresholds of self-consistency are surpassed and zones of indiscernibility entered. In this context, cultural difference could be seen as a permanent disjunction of territoriality, body or code, that which escapes capture to disrupt the self-valorizing forces of its enunciation, a kind of counter-pressure of synchrony in diachrony, a black body within the white imaginary that produces lesions and lines of escape in airtight regimes of definition and multiplies narrative ruptures in every narrative of constitution. With this mind, the paper then proceeds to introduce and analyze eight contributions to the volume that articulate cultural difference in a variety of contexts including translation, cuisine, media, water writing, punk literature, history, urban studies and protest art as well as more theoretically focused deconstructions of territorial fictions that cultural imaginaries rely on.

In contemporary classrooms, it is crucial for teachers to have a thorough understanding of sociological issues in education. Understanding Sociological Theory for Pedagogical Practices addresses sociological theory, highlighting its relevance to policy, curriculum and practice for the pre-service teacher education student. The book explores a range of sociological issues related to diversity, disadvantage, discrimination and marginalisation, contributing to the preparation of future teachers for work in a range of educational contexts. It seeks to dispel the traditional ‘one-size-fits-all’ notion of education, encouraging future teachers to think critically and reflexively in terms of creating a welcoming and equitable student environment through knowledge, inclusion and understanding. Understanding Sociological Theory for Pedagogical Practices is an invaluable resource for primary, secondary and early childhood pre-service teacher education students as they prepare to navigate the ...

The article reads the invention of the Exodus-Narrative in its historical context of the religious and political system of the Ancient Near East. It reconstructs the revolutionary different approach to political power and theological foundation in the development of the Mose- and Exodus-Narrative and its innerbiblical Fortschreibung. For this development it is most decisive that the Exodus-Narrative is not based on a historical migration-movement "from point A to point B", but on a historical confrontation with the political powers at that time. The foundation of a strict monotheistic understanding of theology and the invention of “textual authority” that diverged from the status of scripture in the Ancient Near East and which can be reconstructed through the structure of the Exodus-Narrative and its canonical form as the Tora of Mose, has laid the foundation for the identity of Israel and the basis for the three Monotheistic Religions. The article's argument is strictly developed in correspondence with contemporary exegetical and historical research (esp. E. Otto and Chr. Dohmen) and is brought together with contemporary accounts to political thought from poststructuralist and deconstructive philosophers like Derrida, Levinas, Badiou and Agamben. The outcome of this study is articulated as a contribution to an affirmative reading of the so-called »crisis of representation«.

This article argues against all forms of scientism and the widespread perceived need to define martial arts in order to study martial arts or 'do' martial arts studies. It argues instead for the necessity of theory before definition, including theorisation of the orientation of the field of martial arts studies itself. Accordingly, the chapter criticises certain previous (and current) academic approaches to martial arts, particularly the failed project of hoplology. It then examines the much more promising approaches of current scholarship, such as that of Sixt Wetzler, before critiquing certain aspects of its orientation. Instead of accepting Wetzler's 'polysystem theory' approach uncritically, the article argues instead for the value of a poststructuralist 'discourse' approach in martial arts studies.

Menschliche Kulturen befinden sich in einem Prozess beständiger Umgestaltung und unterliegen mitunter radikalen Veränderungen. In diesem Band werden mit den Mitteln und Methoden der Geschichtsphilosophie, der Soziologie, der Handlungstheorie und der Kulturwissenschaften die grundlegenden Mechanismen und Logiken kultureller Transformationsprozesse herausgearbeitet. Ein interdisziplinäres Spektrum von Perspektiven – u.a. auf die philosophische Ästhetik, die politische Philosophie und die Wissenschaftsgeschichte – zeigt darüber hinaus die Verschiedenartigkeit des Wandels in unterschiedlichen Bereichen der Kultur auf.

(mit Beiträgen von Emil Angehrn, Stefan Deines, Daniel M. Feige, Astrid Erll, Doris Gerber, Oliver Marchard, Johannes Rohbeck, Hartmut Rosa, Martin Seel und Mario Wenning).

The book endeavours to show how research based on poststructuralist discourse analysis can yield analytically beneficial and methodologically sound insights. It largely delivers on these promises. Part I provides a lucid explanation of poststructuralist tenets, showing how Otherness drives policymaking as the backdrop against which identities constitute themselves. During the early 1990s, Western identity was so constituted as ‘civilized’ and ‘controlled’ in opposition to the ‘barbarian’ and ‘violent’ Balkans. The elegant presentation of poststructuralist tenets is welcome, given that such writings are often difficult to access for uninitiated readers.

Przysługujący widmom wywrotowy, niemalże rewolucyjny potencjał został odsunięty oraz zagubiony poprzez pozbycie się tej kontrowersyjnej kategorii z terytorium metafizyki i zbyt pośpieszne odesłanie jej do przestrzeni badań nad literaturą, sprowadzając ją jedynie do roli użytecznego, bezpiecznego narzędzia interpretacji.

Książka Andrzeja Marca odzyskuje niepokojący charakter widmontologii i ponownie wprowadza widma do myśli metafizycznej. Czym nawiedzona i przeniknięta jest tradycyjna metafizyka, co właściwie ją dręczy, nie daje spokoju oraz nieustannie podmywa jej stabilność?

Kategoria widma Derridy posłużyła Marcowi przede wszystkim do rozważań nad charakterem współczesności i przeobrażeń, jakie dokonały się w obrębie myśli ponowoczesnej. Współczesna kultura, zdaniem Marca, stała się miejscem powstawania widm, nieustannie powracających z przeszłości. Uznając, że nie jesteśmy już w stanie tworzyć utopijnych wizji przyszłości, autor stara się zdać sprawę z widmowego charakteru współczesnej kultury, analizując m. in. strategie vintage, retro, nurt no future w kulturze lat 70. czy nurt fantastyki naukowej w literaturze.

Enclosed is the syllabus and course notes from the upper division course I teach in PostModernism and Post-Marxist Critical Theory. It occurs to me that some of these essays--ranging from Horkheimer and Adorno, Baudrillard, Foucault, and the feminist post-modern theorist Donna Haraway may offer some insight and some tools for comprehending the dark times in which we live. While these essays may not be directly aimed at understanding the rise of phenomena like the Alt-Right, toxic masculinity, and particularly violent forms of patriarchy, I think they can show us something about the ideological trends that set us on out current morally troubling path.

“Power is war, the continuation of war by other means”: Foucault’s reversal of Clausewitz’s formula has become a staple of critical theory — but it remains highly problematic on a conceptual level. Elaborated during Foucault’s 1976 lectures (“Society Must Be Defended”), this work-hypothesis theorises “basic warfare” [la guerre fondamentale] as the teleological horizon of socio-political relations. Following Boulainvilliers, Foucault champions this polemological approach, conceived as a purely descriptive discourse on “real” politics and war, against the philosophico-juridical conceptuality attached to liberal society (Hobbes’s Leviathan being here the prime example).
However, in doing so, Foucault did not interrogate the conceptual validity of notions such as power and war, therefore interlinking them without questioning their ontological status. This problematic conflation was partly rectified in 1982, as Foucault proposed a more dynamic definition of power relations: “actions over potential actions”.
I argue, somewhat polemically, that Foucault’s hermeneutics of power still involves a teleological violence, dependent on a polemological representation of human relations as essentially instrumental: this resembles what Derrida names, in “Heidegger’s Ear”, an “anthropolemology”. However, I show that all conceptualisation of power implies its self-deconstruction. This self-deconstructive (or autoimmune) structure supposes an archi-originary unpower prior to power: power presupposes an excess within power, an excessive force, another violence making it both possible and impossible. There is something within power located “beyond the power principle” (Derrida). This (self-)excess signifies a limitless resistantiality co-extensive with power-relationality. It also allows the reversal of pólemos into its opposite, as unpower opens politics and warfare to the messianic call of a pre-political, pre-ontological disruption: the archi-originary force of différance. This force, unconditional, challenges Foucault’s conceptualisations of power, suggesting an originary performativity located before or beyond hermeneutics of power-knowledge, disrupting theoreticity as well as empiricity by pointing to their ontological complicity.
The bulk of this essay is dedicated to sketching the theoretical implications of this deconstructive reading of Foucault with respect to the methodology and conceptuality of political science and social theory.

We live in an age of movement. More than at any other time in history , people and things move longer distances, more frequently, and faster than ever before. All that was solid melted into air long ago and is now in full circulation around the world like dandelion seeds adrift on turbulent winds. We find ourselves, in the early twenty-first century, in a world where every major domain of human activity has become increasingly defined by motion. 1 We have entered a new historical era defined in large part by movement and mobility and are now in need of a new historical on-tology appropriate to our time. The observation that the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first was marked by an increasingly " liquid " and " mobile modernity " is now something widely recognized in the scholarly literature at the turn of the century. 2 Today, however, our orientation to this event is quite different. Almost twenty years into the twenty-first century we now find ourselves situated on the other side of this heralded transition. The question that confronts us today is thus a new one: how to fold all that has melted back up into new solids. 3

[in French]
L’étude du fragment et de l’écriture fragmentaire s’est développée depuis quelques années, sans que pour autant des réponses consensuelles ne surgissent. Si cette pratique est devenue courante après la Seconde Guerre mondiale, elle a pourtant des pionniers. Dans l’univers francophone littéraire européen non français, Charles-Albert Cingria (Genève, 1883-1954) et Paul Nougé (Bruxelles, 1895-1967) sont deux auteurs représentatifs de cette modalité d’écriture, ayant introduit de nombreuses stratégies qui seraient explorées postérieurement. Se concentrant sur l’œuvre publiée et inédite des deux auteurs, la présente étude cherche à dégager les axes d’une pensée littéraire qui s’actualise en pratiques d’écriture fragmentaire, dans des espaces génologiques et thématiques de frontière. Dans ce cadre, le lecteur, expérimentant constamment la violence métamorphique textuelle, joue un rôle primordial.

[in English]
The study of the fragment and of fragmentary writing has increased in recent years. However, consensual answers have been difficult to find. If this practice has become regular since the Second World War, it certainly had precursors. In the francophone non French literary European world, Charles-Albert Cingria (Geneva, 1883-1954) and Paul Nougé (Brussels, 1895-1967) are two outstanding authors of this writing modality, who introduced several strategies that were subsequently to be developed. The present study, based in the published and unpublished work of both authors, aims to identify the guidelines of a literary conception materialised in practices of fragmentary writing, in generic and thematic spaces of frontier. Within this context, the reader, permanently experiencing metamorphic textual violence, plays a major role.

[in Portuguese]
O estudo do fragmento e da escrita fragmentária tem vindo a desenvolver-se nos últimos anos, sem que no entanto respostas consensuais apareçam. Se esta prática se tornou muito comum depois da Segunda Guerra Mundial, ela tem pioneiros. No universo literário francófono europeu não francês, Charles-Albert Cingria (Genebra, 1883-1954) e Paul Nougé (Bruxelas, 1895-1967) são autores marcantes desta prática de escrita, tendo introduzido várias estratégias que viriam a ser desenvolvidas posteriormente. Centrando-se na obra publicada e inédita dos dois autores, este estudo procura identificar as linhas mestras de um pensamento literário que se actualiza em práticas de escrita fragmentária, em espaços genológicos e temáticos de fronteira. Neste contexto, o leitor, experimentando permanentemente a violência metamórfica textual, assume um papel determinante.

Umberto Eco’s The Open Work deals with the making of art. Open work has two constituents: a) multiplicity of meanings and the participation of audience. Artists generate the work of art allowing the audience to fabricate numerous meanings. Work of art as an open work is contingent and the openness toward meaning determines its contingency. A work of art may be open from the audience point of view because interpretation is encompassing and occurs at various levels of human perception. Thus we perceive meanings in a work of art with various perspectives. Eco explains open work as an artwork in process or dynamic progress without any fixed conclusion/ending or meaning. He underlines the necessity in differentiating the association between the work of art and its creator. This paper is an attempt to interpretively read Umberto Eco’s concept of open work, meaning and information.

CITATION: Stinson, D. W. (2004). African American male students and achievement in school mathematics: A critical postmodern analysis of agency (Doctoral dissertation). Retrieved from ProQuest Dissertations & Theses: A & I. (ATT 3194548).

ABSTRACT: The purpose of this study was to shed light on the schooling experiences of African American male students who embraced school, academics, and mathematics. In particular, the study examined the influence of sociocultural discourses on the agency of 4 African American men in their early 20s who demonstrated achievement and persistence in school mathematics. Agency in this context was defined as the participants’ ability to accommodate, resist, or reconfigure the available sociocultural discourses that surround African American males in order for them to effectively negotiate these discourses in their pursuit of success.

The study used qualitative action research methodology (Kemmis & Wilkinson, 1998) located within a critical postmodern theoretical frame (Kincheloe & McLaren, 1994). More specifically, the participants of the study were asked to read, reflect on, and respond to current research literature regarding the schooling experiences of African American male students. Their responses were analyzed using an eclectic theoretical framework that included poststructural theory, critical race theory, and critical (postmodern) theory. Poststructural theory provided a frame for rethinking and redefining key concepts such as person, agency, and power, among others. Critical race theory provided a frame for understanding how the discourse of race and racism operates within U.S. social structures. And critical (postmodern) theory provided a frame for discussing the purposes of education research.

The reporting and analysis of the data revealed that the participants had acquired robust mathematics identities (Martin, 2000), identities that positively impacted their sense of agency. How the participants acquired such uncharacteristic mathematics identities for African American male students was to be found, in part, in how they understood the sociocultural structures and discourses of U.S. society and how they accommodated, resisted, or reconfigured the specific discourses that surround African American males. Although at times the responses from the participants were similar, their responses were never monolithic—not across participants, and not even within participants. Present throughout the responses from each participant, however, was recognition of himself as a discursive formation (Foucault, 1969/1972) who could actively accommodate, resist, or reconfigure sociocultural discourses as a means to subversively repeat (Butler, 1990) his constituted “raced” self.

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Thinking posthumanly – from a post-Enlightenment, critical, new materialist perspective – things, including concepts, become more permeable and topological – they leak and stretch. Freed from limiting notions of agency, things behave. Rivers have established the same legal rights as humans in New Zealand  and India,  stones have been reported slithering across the desert floor in California,  an electrical power grid in the USA has revealed a unique agential dexterity  and walls have been spotted walking over mountains in the UK’s Lake District.  Thinking with a posthuman partiality, we begin to witness a democracy of objects rather than an anthropocentric dictatorship over inorganic materials. If agency is reworked into an ‘enactment’ as opposed to something that is ‘held’,  conceivably humans and other biological organisms are not necessary for agency (or life) to emerge as inorganic material agency erupts from unchoreographed assemblages of spacetimematter(ing). And if cognitive and dermatological boundaries are no longer organ-ised by an Enlightenment prescription, how might pedagogies perform differently and more equitably?
This article draws on the empirical materials from two psychogeographic walks that agitate lithic spaces with a posthuman affection. Part One examples a radical mobile classroom that I undertake regularly with university students where the use of it-narratives exposes the distributed agency of buildings. I explore what a posthuman gaze might do to/for performative pedagogies as my students attempt to interview a building. Part Two offers an example from my previous post-qualitative PhD inquiry which – by manipulating the practices of psychogeography and schizocartography – highlights how a shopping centre assemblage called Liverpool ONE diagnosed itself with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD), thus reinforcing the notion of inorganic agential distribution. The pedagogic implications of this posthuman diagnosis are discussed.

The state can not prevent the existence of universal ethical claims that are included in  its regime but not represented in it. Alain Badiou's philosophy is devoted to these claims and defends them as forms of political truth striving for validity and representation.

With contributions from:
Alain Badiou, Lorenzo Chiesa, Oliver Feltham, Dominik Finkelde, Gernot Kamecke, Paul M. Livingston, Rado Riha, Frank Ruda, Arno Schubbach, Yannis Stavrakakis, Alberto Toscano and Jan Völker.
Editor:
Dominik Finkelde is professor of philosophy at the Munich School of Philosophy.

Amideo, E., 2014, Review Essay of 'Archivi affettivi: Un catalogo/Affective Archives: A Catalogue', by Marco Pustianaz, Giulia Palladini and Annalisa Sacchi (eds.), Anglistica AION: an Interdisciplinary Journal, 18:1, pp. 107-109, ISSN: 2035-8504.

A few years before the beginning of the Second World War, the rapprochement between socialism and western esotericism  would  be  outlined  in  France.  This  effort,  produced around the Collège de Sociologie as a reaction to Fascism, aimed to reactivate ideas and efforts that can be traced back to the French Revolution. The resulting meta-narrative,  constructed  by  various  intellectuals  around  Georges  Bataille,  including  Walter  Benjamin  and Pierre Klossowski, sought to establish its origins in Valentianism and, later, in Roman theology. The aim was to create an intellectual alternative to Marxism through the  ideas  of  Fourier,  Blanqui,  Sade,  and  Nietzsche  inventing  a  construct  that  would  decisively  influence Post-structuralism in the 1960s.KEYWORDSPALAVRAS-CHAVEMarxismo; História da historiografia; Walter BenjaminMarxism; History of Historiography; Walter BenjaminRenato Amado Peixotohttp://orcid.org/0000-0002-2342-4215

In their book “Civilizing Security” Loader and Walker argue that security can have an instrumental role in promoting a more democratic and broadly civilised relationship between individuals and between them and the state. This is thanks to the constitutive nature of security which makes it a producer and a product of social relations. Moreover they claim it is the necessary priority of the state to be the main entity in ensuring collective security. Thus, at the domestic level as well as the translational one, the state is still presented as the predominant matrix of security, albeit not the monopolist one. The end goal of the project of civilising security is to attain security in its axiomatic form, through the last stage of theory, anchored pluralism, which should allow a cooperation between states and other entities in guaranteeing security.

Can language and literature cure psychological trauma? If so, what forms do they (have to) take
in doing so? When does language hit the wall where the unspeakable mandates silence? And
where might literature come in as the rescuing hand by offering forms of expression which are
rooted in speech but transcend the merely spoken? This study confronts these issues through
the double lenses of Sebastian Barry’s oeuvre and the complex of dissociative disorders that
are at work both in his creative output and the ways in which he fictionalizes dark and traumatic
biographical data.
Re-negotiated in the process are the deconstructivist trauma paradigm that has come to
dominate trauma discourse in the humanities as well as the duality of Barry’s critical reception.
Barry is either being hailed as a rescuer of marginalized, ‘subaltern’ histories or admonished as
too radical a proponent of historical revisionism. A dissociative reading of literature’s
capabilities and limitations in addressing trauma and Barry’s literary mission to work-through
family trauma in his work moves the discourse beyond radical dualities towards a more
integrated understanding of posttraumatic literature.

A number of studies suggest that the lack of “gender sensitive” drug treatment services for women represents a pressing social problem, second only to the problem of “women's substance abuse” itself. This article interrogates these “problem representations” by asking on what basis they are considered uniquely problematic. Through a critical analysis of research on women published between 1990–2012 in relevant high impact journals, the article identifies a dominant view of women in the drug field as a “special population” with “unique treatment needs.” The article suggests that this view not only reinforces a limited understanding of the harms associated with women's substance abuse, but might also paradoxically enable programs and services for women to remain as “add-ons” and/or narrow the range of “gender sensitive” approaches adopted.

The article attempts a comprehensive review of the human security concept in order to question its utility for both research and policy-making. It notes the term’s interdisciplinary and extensively normative content that have facilitated its evolution into a successful security discourse. On the other hand, human security’s wide appeal has as a side-effect an extended conceptual polysemy inhibiting the cumulation of knowledge and the development of a relevant theory. Absence of conceptual clarity has also complicated its policy implementation. The article attempts to break the deadlock and move the debate forward by using the work of John Gerring and Paul A. Barresi on concept formation as an organizing device.

This essay is a close examination of Bryn Mawr College Dormitory (1960–1965) by Louis I. Kahn. In relation to Manuel DeLanda’s ‘‘Emergence, Causality and Realism’’, the essay considers preliminary plan studies by Kahn, the building as realised, and the idea of active matter in DeLanda’s essay. It is organised in five sections. The first sets out the questions and approach. The second, third and fourth sections treat respectively the plan, entry hall, and external building fabric of Bryn Mawr. The notion of active matter as set out in DeLanda’s essay and touched on in section one, is treated in the final section. Topics for subsequent investigation are offered as a conclusion.

Denne artikel udforsker mulighederne for at udtænke et begreb om fællesskab inden for et poststrukturalistisk paradigme. Der er skrevet meget om relationer, grupper og inklusion, men fælleskab er i mindre grad et teoretiseret og analyseret begreb. Ambitionen er teoretisk at arbejde mig frem til en poststrukturalistisk informeret konceptualisering af fællesskab på basis af en empirisk interesse i at undersøge unge muslimers deltagelse i religiøse fællesskaber i København. Fem dimensioner identificeres som særlig vigtige i denne forbindelse: 1. Fællesskab som proces, 2. Fællesskab som noget, man kan tale om, og som noget, der konstant forhandles, 3. Fællesskab som situeret og forbundet med subjektivering, 4. Fællesskab, som hverken overindividuel eller subjektiv bevægelse og 5. Fællesskab som forbundet med belonging. Artiklen bevæger sig imellem teoretisk og empirisk analyse og inddrager et fokus på belonging som en central dimension i forståelsen af konstruktionen af fællesskaber.

CITATION: Stinson, D. W., & Powell, G. C. (2009). Teachers reflecting differently: Deconstructing the discursive teacher/student binary. In S. L. Swars, D. W. Stinson, & S. Lemons-Smith (Eds.), Proceedings of the 31st annual meeting of the North American Chapter of the International Group for the Psychology of Mathematics Education (pp. 320–327). Atlanta, GA: Georgia State University.

This session explores the ways that practicing teachers came to reflect differently regarding the discursive teacher/student binary during a graduate-level course entitled “Mathematics Education within the Postmodern.” Using Dewey’s concept of reflective thinking, as well as Foucault’s discourse and Derrida’s deconstruction, we show how the course provided new suggestions for the students as they continued their journey of becoming teachers. Through interweaving comments written by the students with concepts borrowed from postmodern philosophers and theorists, we illustrate how the teachers began to understand that teachers and students might indeed be described differently in the postmodern.

This paper traces the symbolic importance of gender to the assertion of national and religious identities drawing on case study data with youth from Senegal, Pakistan, Nigeria and Lebanon. We start with a brief overview of the theoretical and methodological approach to the research. We then illustrate the gender assumptions within youth identity narratives and the ways these produce masculinist and patriarchal national imaginaries that instantiate a heteronormative hierarchy and gender polarity. Intersecting with this, we explore the ways that particular claims to Islam also legitimise and depend on the surveillance and regulation of women. We further show how gender remains a significant dimension of national othering and a site of explicit postcolonial resistance that strengthens and stabilises heteronormative gender hierarchies and associated inequalities. Nevertheless, youth’s imaginaries are of a modernising religious nation, which are articulated in contra-distinction to the secular imaginaries of former colonising nations of the West. Provoked by this opposition, we show how religion is central in the production of nation states, colonial and post-colonial, and the ways that gender is inscribed in both. We point to the gender continuities of the post-colonial and former colonising states. Both sustain the continued surveillance and regulation of women and their bodies are used to inscribe power regimes and define difference. Finally we question the adequacy of liberal understandings of gender equality for disrupting the powerful gender symbolism embedded in youth’s national and religious imaginaries as well as the material conditions that emanate from these.

This is my own translation of Bataille's "epic poem," "L'Archangélique" (1942, republished in 1967). This version corrects the erroneous or awkward renderings in the published English translation by Mark Spitzer, which was consulted in the course of this translation.

Extended review and discussion of Emily Apter's "Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability" (New York: Verso, 2013). The book's most powerful argument, in my view, is that the "untranslatable" profitless excreta of the world's literatures are both the matter with which to rethink comparison and the limits of the inflationary World Literature industry.