Capitalism's Anxious Whole: Fear,Capture and Escape in the Grundrisse

Abstract: Two Hegels inhabit the Grundrisse. The first is conservative of the “selfsame” subject that continuously returns to itself as non‐identical identity and propels “history”. The other Hegel tarries with the “negative” he (which or variously calls “non‐being”, “otherness”“difference”) to disrupt this plenary subject to Marx's reading of a Hegel who is different‐in‐himself lends Grundrisse its electric buzz: seizing Hegel's “negative” as the not‐value of value, i.e. “labor”, Marx explains how capital must continuously enroll labor to its will in order to survive and expand. But this enrollment is never given; hence, despite its emergent structure of necessity, capital's return to itself as “self‐animating value” is never free of peril. The most speculative aspect of my argument is that the figure of “labor” in Grundrisse, because of its radically open formulation as not‐value, anticipates the elusive subject of difference in postcolonial theory, “the subaltern”—that figure which evades dialectical integration, and is in some ontological way inscrutable to the “master”. Unexpectedly, then Grundrisse gives us a way to think beyond the epistemic and geographic power of “Europe”.     

The Urban Sensorium: Space, Ideology and the Aestheticization of Politics

This essay outlines a theoretical framework for investigating the links between the production of urban space (Lefebvre) and the production of ideology (Althusser) and hegemony (Gramsci) by proposing the concept of “the urban sensorium”. With a view to the aesthetics of urban experience and everyday life, this concept aligns Fredric Jameson's “postmodern” adaptation of city planner Kevin Lynch's research on “cognitive mapping” with Walter Benjamin's insights on “aestheticizing politics” in order to ask: how does urban space mediate ideology and produce hegemony while aestheticizing politics? In so doing, the spotlight falls on a conceptual constellation including four key theoretical terms: “ideology”, “aesthetics”, “mediation” and “totality”. While working through them, the essay argues that Jameson's outstanding contribution to a spatialized understanding of “postmodernism” lies above all in his Marxist (Lukácsian, Althusserian and Sartrean) theorization of mediation and totality; whereas radical students of the city can find the richest dialectical elaboration of these two concepts with special attention to space and urbanism in the oeuvre of Henri Lefebvre, especially in the recently translated The Urban Revolution.     

The origin and evolution of the concept of mixin (superstition): A review of May Fourth scientific views

ABSTRACT

This article explores the evolving connotations of the concept of “superstition” up to the establishment of “superstition studies,” in an examination of the process of secularization experienced by early modern Chinese thought under the impact of Western science. In traditional texts, the Chinese term mixin (迷信, literally “delusional beliefs”), modernly translated as“superstition,” carries diverse and variable meanings: aside from referring to the proper or improper content of ideas and beliefs, mixin also has political connotations, broadly referring to beliefs or behaviors differing from the official rituals. On an ideological level, the traditional concept of mixin refers to a category of thought opposed to Confucian concepts such as the cosmology of Heaven, Earth, and Man, or the idea that “for a man to sacrifice to a spirit which does not belong to him is flattery.” In the late Qing Dynasty, as the idea of “superstition” as opposed to “science” was introduced via Japan, the traditional connotations of mixin evaporated, and it merged with other neologisms. From the late Qing to the early Republic, the parameters of “superstition” were expanded to encompass anything at odds with “reason.” This was also a reflection of China’s shift from the “Classical Age” to the “Age of Science,” as Confucian concepts and scientific ideas successively served as the criteria for judging “superstition.” As of the present, a consensus has yet to be reached on how to distinguish between “religion” and “superstition.” This paper shall seek to clarify the connotations of mixin or “superstition” in different contexts and their connection to the changing times, which may aid in understanding the complex facets of this issue.     

This Is Not an Improvisation: Letitia Landon and the Slipperiness of Taxonomy

ABSTRACT

Writing in 2007, in The Wordsworth Circle, Jeffrey Robinson remarked on the “ephemerality” of improvisational poetry, its fundamental resistance to being “preserved.” Printed poetry is typically regarded as “fixed” and static: what any poem represents as improvisation is, at best, only a record, executed in a fixed medium, of a performance whose infinite variability is inherent in the nature of improvisation itself. Partly an homage to Rene Magritte’s This is Not a Pipe (1928–29) and to Michel Foucault’s 1973 essay on that painting, and using as a test case The Improvisatrice (1825), the long poem by Letitia Elizabeth Landon, herself a devotee of interdisciplinary and multimedia performance, this essay considers the physical, structural, and methodological challenges and limitations posed to printed “word art” by works that purport to be, or aspire to the condition of, “improvisations.” The improvisatrice who is the poem’s narrator claims to be both a painter and a songstress, but her “speech,” captured and rendered in printed words by Landon (who ventriloquizes that speech), can neither “be” nor even “represent” a work produced (“performed”) in visual art or vocal song. In her long poem Landon effectively creates a literary trompe l’oeil, an illusion that depends for its “completion” upon the reader’s implied participation in that performative act of completion. In the process, Landon’s poem reveals the fundamental incompatibility of improvisational literary production with the performative nature of improvisation.     

A Wax Effigy Pierced by Three Bones: The Pharaonic Origins of a Late-Antique Cursing Ritual?

Papyrus fragments from a late-antique Greek magical handbook preserve a unique recipe that directs us to make a wax “voodoo doll” and pierce it with three bones – “the left one, the right one and the one from the back” – “of an eisphatēs”, a previously unknown Greek word that has been emended to mean “sacrificial victim” (sphaktēs) or “dove” (phattēs). Emendation is not warranted, however, because the word is probably a local and previously unknown Egyptian term for the Nile catfish, which has three distinctive nail-like spines – the right and left pectoral and the dorsal – that match those of the eisphatēs. The bone of this fish is, moreover, used in a native Egyptian cursing ritual of Pharaonic date also involving a wax “voodoo doll”, that is inscribed with the bone, rather than pierced by it.     

Vers une Europe de la culture ?

Au Conseil de l'Europe et dans la Communauté européenne, les sens de “culture”, “civilisation” et de “identité culturelle” européennes sont a priori difficiles â identifier et évoluent sur la période 1949–93. L'étude vise, en s'aidant d'une méthode de décompte des mots et d'un rapide examen de l'évolution historique et scientifique de “culture” et “civilisation”, á dégager certains de leurs traits particuliers, au‐delà de la confusion traditionnelle entre “culture” et “civilisation” européennes et entre “culture” et “identité culturelle” européennes. “Civilisation européenne” a pris peu á peu une signification supranationale et s'est raréfiée, tandis que “culture européenne” s'est rapidement divisée en “cultures infranationales”. Les institutions montrent aussi leurs tendances plus ou moins favorables á l'unité européenne, par leur propre utilisation des concepts devenus des éléments “test”.     

Shelley’s Jingling Food for Oblivion: Hybridizing High and Low Styles and Forms

ABSTRACT

This essay argues that there was a sense in which Shelley actively approved of “jingling verse.” His poetic energy was sustained by a substratum of popular and tuneful versifying, such as impromptus, bouts-rimés, anagrams, enigmas, ballads, Mother Goose rhymes, proverbs, hymns, and drinking songs. He hybridizes the registers and meters of these humble forms with elevated, sublime, and erudite ones. This hybridization is, arguably, connected to the characteristic coexistence of the direct and clear with the knotty and puzzling in his poetry. After a brief account of Shelley’s submerged youthful reading, noting in passing that Shelley’s lyrics proved amenable during the early twentieth century to recycling as Shelleyesque jingles, the essay illustrates its thesis from unfamiliar fragments in Shelley’s notebooks, such as the late lyric fragment “Time is flying,” and from more familiar matter such as “Dirge for the Year,” “Mont Blanc,” “The Cloud,” “On the Medusa of Leonardo da Vinci,” “The Sensitive Plant,” “Song: to the Men of England,” “Ode to the West Wind,” and Peter Bell the Third.     

The Obelized Amicē: Horace,Carm. 3. 2. 1

The author defends amice (“in a friendly way”, “showing goodwill”) discussing the use of the adverb amice elsewhere and especially the problem of its reference.     

Dwelling in the Sites of Finitude: Resisting the Violence of the Metaphysical Globe

Abstract: In this paper Martin Heidegger's notions about dwelling in the sites of finitude and “power‐free” (Macht‐los) “letting‐be” (Gelassenheit) are explored as fundamental possibilities for resisting the ontological violence posed by global capitalism, the planetary outcome of the metaphysical condition Heidegger calls the “machination” (Machenschaft). Beginning from the planetary machination—the emergence of the flexible and circularly functioning power of calculative intelligibility—resistance is understood ontologically and hence as a radical critique of power as a consummation of the history of the metaphysical constitution of being. The paper culminates in a discussion of Heidegger's view on the awakening of the “other beginning” of the abyssal “Event” of being, a groundless “time‐space‐play” capable of constituting an alternative modality of relations no longer based upon the calculative functions of power but upon groundless thought and non‐violent dwelling in the earth‐sites of finite being.     

Return of the Whig: Reviewing Historiographies of the Meaning of “Secular” in the Australian Colonial Public Instruction Acts

The term “secular” in the Colonial Australian public instruction acts was always controversial. Recent policy debates seek to draw a connection between its original intent and removing religion from schools, notably Marion Maddox's Taking God to School (2014), and Catherine Byrne's “Free, Compulsory and (Not) Secular” (2013). The issue resurfaced recently in a NSW Teachers' Federation Research Paper (Waight, 2022), and in Gross and Rutland's Special Religious Education in Australia and Its Value to Contemporary Society (2021). I propose that while this is a valid public policy issue, any originalist argument actually relies upon a singular historiographical argument, namely a “Whig” historiography. However, across historians the meaning of “secular” has actually been evaluated through four different historiographies: a “Whig” progress narrative; economic materialism; critical theory; and a religious/nationalist approach. Maddox, Byrne and Waight's approaches can be characterised within a “Whig” approach to Australian education history, originally found in “The Melbourne School” of Austin and Gregory, and the textbooks of Barcan. Its revival presents a good opportunity to survey the topic of education historiography, assess the “Whig” argument, and to propose that religious/nationalist historiography provides a more accurate interpretation of the original intent of the term “secular.”     

HEIDEGGER,LATOUR AND THE REIFICATION OF THINGS: THE INVERSION AND SPATIAL ENCLOSURE OF THE SUBSTANTIVE LANDSCAPE OF THINGS – THE LAKE DISTRICT CASE

“Thing” has undergone reification, and it has done so together with its linguistic “conjoined twin” – “landscape”. Whereas thing once was the name for meetings where people assembled to treat common things that matter, things, in the modern sense, have become physical objects (things as matter). Likewise, landscape's meaning has been reified from being a polity constituted by common thing meetings treating substantive things that matter, to becoming a spatial assemblage of physical things as matter. To fully grasp the contemporary meaning of both things and landscape it is necessary to understand the way in which those meanings are the intertwined outcome of a process of revolutionary inversion, or turning inside–out, by which the meaning of things has been spatialized, enclosed, individualized, privatized, scaled and reified as a constituent of the mental and social landscape of modernity. The potentiality of the concept of thing lies, it will be argued, in its continued containment of older, subaltern meanings that can work to empower an alternative “non‐modern” understanding of things along the lines of, but distinct from, Bruno Latour's notion of Dingpolitik, which will be termed “thing politics” here. This argument is analysed in relation to Martin Heidegger's concept of the “thing”, and exemplified by the mandate of the European Landscape Convention, and the modern planning usage of Landscape Character Assessment and Ecosystem Services, as applied to England's Lake District.     

Mostafa Malekian: Spirituality,Siyasat‐Zadegi and (A)political Self‐Improvement

Mostafa Malekian has yet to receive much attention in Western academic literature pertaining to Iranian intellectual life, but inside Iran, he has emerged as a popular public intellectual; seen as both a culmination of and rupture with the project of “religious intellectualism.” Rather than offer a revolutionary and politically engaged vision of Islam, or a “reformist” or “democratic” interpretation of Shi?ism, his project seeks to integrate what he calls “rationality” (?aqlaniyat) and “spirituality” (ma?naviyat). As Malekian's project has developed, it has broken, in a number of important respects, with mainstream Islam as practiced in Iran, the religious reformist project, and even organized religion as a whole. This article seeks not only to offer one of the first comprehensive analysis of his existential and social thought in English, but also to analyze his project's deep affinities with a pervasive fatigue vis‐à‐vis collective projects of political emancipation and even “politics” tout court, in the latter phases of the “reformist” President Hojjat al‐Islam Seyyed Mohammad Khatami's tenure.     

Defending Political Augustinianism: Brague and Taubes on the “Divine” as a Common Conceptual Space

Augustine holds that each society needs to be oriented to “God and the good.” He invidiously compares the earthly city as receptive to the true God with the earthly city as opposed to the true God, and he resolutely holds that only an earthly city oriented to the true God can be genuinely described as just and legitimate. At first glance this “political Augustinianism” hardly seems very attractive to non-believers or defensible in the eyes of modern secular liberals, and yet in this article I wish to defend it and commend it universally, that is, to promote its benefits and critical insights beyond religious circles. I commend an emphasis on “the divine” (to theion), rather than on God (ho theos), as a bridge to God for believers but also, and more importantly in the West's present liberal pluralist context, as a common halting place where believers and non-believers alike can sense “the beyond” (Augustine's “God and the good”) in their midst. I develop my argument that the “divine,” thus understood, can provide us with a common conceptual space where we can abide, converse, and even agree: (i) by engaging with Jacob Taubes who powerfully criticises such an emphasis on the “divine,” (ii) by considering “divine” natural law as a bridge and halting place between immanence and transcendence, and (iii) by reflecting upon the work of Rémi Brague who has recently given powerful support to the importance and utility in the present intellectual climate of the divine (to theion) as a bridge to God (ho theos).     

Planning Culture—A Concept to Explain the Evolution of Planning Policies and Processes in Europe?

Abstract

This article examines the complex relations between spatial planning and its cultural context (including the specific socio-economic patterns and related cultural norms, values, traditions and attitudes). To be able to analyze the extent to which spatial planning adapts to external pressures such as Europeanization, a “culturized planning model” with the three dimensions “planning artefacts”, “planning environment” and “societal environment” is used. It can be observed that the “harmonization” of spatial planning practices can result from external pressures such as EU regulations as well as (horizontal) collective learning processes. However, “harmonization” does not necessarily result in convergence. Adaptational pressures such as Europeanization often result in the customization of existing structures, frames and policies (“planning artefacts” and “planning environment”) but do not fundamentally change the underlying core cultural traits (“societal environment”). These cultural traits are quite resistant to change and help maintain a diversity of planning cultures and policies in Europe.     

“Remember me”: Hamlet,memory and Bloom’s poiesis

Although memory is not explicitly named in “Hades”, it nonetheless features centrally. Intertextuality is an example of memory, and in “Hades” Shakespeare’s Hamlet is remembered – specifically the Ghost’s relation to Hamlet, whom he bids to “Remember” and “revenge”. Derrida calls this relation “hauntological”: it is characterised by an uncertain gaze, the father telling his son what to do, and the son mourning for his father. In Bloom’s mourning for his father, Virag, hauntology might be expected. However, it is Bloom’s late son, Rudy, who hauntologises Bloom, thereby revitalising the latter; this adjusts Shakespeare’s original hauntology. While considering repeatable ways of maintaining this hauntology, Bloom jocularly reverts to new technology: the phonograph and photograph. His plan reveals his relish for liminality and poiesis: being and non-being at the same time. Bloom is thus remembered into the future, all the while Ulysses is haunted by Hamlet.