From Secular Criticism to Critical Fidelity

Stathis Gourgouris has responded to the question “Is critique secular” with a decisive “yes” and has offered a passionate and sophisticated defense of this position in Lessons in Secular Criticism. Yet, his argument suffers from a simplistic opposition between the religious and the secular. If we are to think critically about criticism and about religion, we need to think beyond such oppositions and be open to learning from religious forms of criticism. The article works through Gourgouris to move from his emphasis on critical autonomy to what I will call critical fidelity. Working with theologians Chrisitine Helmer, Ted Smith, and Rowan Williams, I argue that certain forms of religious criticism help us think a social and political criticism beyond endless demystification and “interrogation” by identifying and cultivating critical practices of attachment that make possible liberating social bonds.     

Changemakers and change agents: encouraging students as researchers through Changemaker’s programmes

Abstract

This paper examines the role played by a student-organized research conference in the age of research-led teaching and active learning. Drawing on our experiences of organizing two departmental conferences in Geography in March 2016 and March 2017, we begin to outline how institutional support and funding for student-led “Changemakers” projects can not only introduce students to specific aspects of research (in the case of our conference, to disseminating and communicating research findings), but also encourage collaboration and mutual support outside of formal staff-student hierarchies of teaching, learning and marking.     

Globalization and the closing of the universe of discourse: the contemporary relevance of Marcuse's “Marxism”1

This paper assumes that there is something in the logic of the capitalist mode of production such that, in the words of Marx and Engels' Communist Manifesto, it “must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere,” giving a “cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country.” It assumes, that is, that there is an inherent tendency in capitalism to seek to globalize. Further, it is argued that one can plausibly claim that the capitalist mode of production has succeeded, or is succeeding, in globalizing against the countervailing forces of the managing state and organized labor. It is argued that this development represents, to use Marcuse's words, something like a “closing of the universe of discourse” or a “paralysis of criticism” and the emergence of a “society without opposition,” but in a context, in crucial respects, fundamentally different from that analysed by Marcuse in the 1960s.     

The Senzai Maru's visit to Shanghai and its understanding of China

ABSTRACT

The significance of the Senzai Maru’s 1862 journey to Shanghai was great. From this opportunity, Japan not only learned from its neighbor the danger of closing off one’s borders and refusing to change, but also the importance of expanding its horizons and “learning from the world.” From these lessons, Japan transitioned from “expelling barbarians” toward “enlightenment,” from conservative to “reformist.” After successfully overthrowing the Tokugawa shogunate, Japan’s Meiji reforms thrived.     

Traditions of learning around the English Battle of the Books

This article calls for a reassessment of the Battle of the Books by arguing that the dispute did not simply oppose imitators of the ancients and supporters of modern critical scholarship, but that many scholars and critics were also attempting to support the authority of the ancients through their philological methods. A deep undercurrent of concern about the methods of philology can be traced in the development of biblical and patristic scholarship in the late seventeenth century. The article further emphasizes how the satirists (Swift especially) were aware of this strand of criticism, and yet how they hid their debt to it in order to portray textual criticism as a whole as a pedantic exercise. The Battle of the Books should therefore not be seen as a straightforward opposition between “supporters of the ancients” and “supporters of the moderns,” but as contention between doctrine and reason.     

Very long term history and people's history

Often William Blake and Isaac Newton are positioned as “opposites”: Newton the great systematizer, Blake the visionary artist. (Blake himself, in fact, seemed to have set up this direct opposition.) However, this opposition is perhaps too simple and overlooks the intricacies of each thinker's work. Further, this straightforward “opposition” fails to account for the pressure that scholarship itself, always occurring from a particular subjective position, applies to shape its objects of study; that is, it creates a useful “Newton” and a useful “Blake” with which to work. Here I employ spatial theorist Henri Lefebvre's technique of “critical thirding” (as Edward Soja has called it), or accounting for “an-Other” position in the dialectic of “Blake” and “Newton”. I consider where Blake and Newton were perhaps more similar than has been suggested in the scholarly literature, and, more crucially, how scholarship itself mobilizes (or indeed “creates”) its own, subjectively useful, “Blake” and “Newton” in order to make particular arguments.     

Corporate gift or political sacrifice? State-sponsored CSR and electricity provision in Guinean extractive enclaves

Going beyond a static conceptualization of the mining enclave, recent research increasingly scrutinizes the role of corporate social responsibility (CSR) schemes as a means of territorial entanglement. Several authors refer to the notion of the “corporate gift” to describe these control and coping strategies as well as the resulting power relations between companies and the population around the production facilities. In this article, we focus on electricity provision as an example for such a “gift”. Extensive field research in the Guinean mining areas of Siguiri, Kamsar, and Mambia showed that in all of these areas, the mining companies not only acted as “givers” of electricity, but also handed over the bill for this electricity provision to the state. Confronted with this curious fact of state-sponsored CSR, this article questions the foundations of the arguments around the notion of the corporate gift and comes to the conclusion that these three electrification projects were, at the same time, acts of “political sacrifice”. This concept points beyond the obvious conclusion that mining companies try to maximize their legitimization efforts in an increasingly competitive environment and underlines the role of the state in “company-community” relations and the maintenance of extractive enclaves.     

Disrupted Futures: Unpacking Metaphors of Marginalization in Eviction and Resettlement Narratives

In this paper, I examine how linguistic tropes that emerged during ethnographic fieldwork in a Delhi resettlement colony both capture and reaffirm the experiences of forced eviction and marginalization on the urban periphery. By analyzing the urban subjectivities embedded in recurrent metaphors, I explore how people “make sense” of dispossession and ultimately, articulate their “place” in the city. Drawing on Lakoff and Johnson (1980, Metaphors We Live By; 1999, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought), I argue that the utilization of metaphors in everyday language influences how people structure their relationships—with the state, with other residents of the resettlement colony, and with the city itself—and captures the pervasive uncertainty of resettlement. Unpacking such metaphors as “guides” to thought and practice can contribute to theories on spaces of insecurity and performativity of the marginalized in the city.     

“Global/local” community engagement: advancing integrative learning and situated solidarity

This article illustrates how “global/local” community engagement, a particular form of experiential learning and political work that draws upon geography conceptually, pedagogically, and programmatically, is well suited to advance integrative learning and invite students into social action. Through specific examples from Mount Holyoke College, we argue that “global/local” community engagement helps students cultivate the skills and dispositions of reciprocity, reflexivity, and place-based and interdependent knowledge production. These are habits of mind and patterns of praxis necessary for enacting “situated solidarity,” a practice with great potential for grappling with the complex challenges and marked divisiveness of the twenty-first century. As our empirical examples demonstrate, the geographic concept of contour lines matched with the pedagogies of accompaniment and co-labor guide “global/local” community engagement. We conclude with a set of recommendations for implementing “global/local” community engagement in other institutions of higher education to reveal the context-specificity of our examples and the possibilities for application elsewhere.     

The New View of Makeup and the Consumption of Cosmetics among the Women of Shanghai in the Modern Age

Under the pressure of the national crisis in modern China, millennia-old traditional concepts have been broken and adjusted, and new trends and ideas have emerged in large numbers. In order to defeat local cosmetics, from the moment they entered China foreign cosmetics companies attacked the traditional Chinese cosmetics of eyebrow pigment (dai), lip pigment (gong), rouge (zhi), and face powder (fen). Corresponding to the enlightenment ideas of the early twentieth century, women could no longer pursue beauty in a way that harmed their bodies. In the movement to liberate women’s bodies in the 1920s, radical intellectuals developed a severe criticism of the bad habits of using corsets and applying powder, and the concept of “healthy beauty” came into being. However, in the context of the development of the women’s liberation movement and the respect for women’s consumer rights, the healthy beauty theory failed to suppress women’s consumption of beauty products, and “natural beauty” and “artificial beauty” ultimately coexisted in lifestyles of women in the modern era of Shanghai.     

Hendrik de Man and Attila József: On Soft and Hard Conditions of Socialism

This article compares Hendrik de Man's (1885–1953) neo-Marxist approach with that of the Hungarian poet Attila József (1905–37). It suggests that de Man's “refinement” of Marxism amounts to foregrounding psychological aspects; he tends to replace “hard,” political or economic elements of Marxist and neo-Marxist theories with “soft,” psychological elements. For him Intellectual Socialism stands in opposition to Labor Socialism. This view may have challenged the synthesis-makers, including József, who sees himself as a “proletarian poet”: in his poetry he formulates the optimal relationship between the new intelligentsia and the proletariat, addressing the philosophical dilemmas raised by de Man. Whereas for de Man, Marx and philosophical Marxism are both of the past, demanding a mechanical interpretation, for József, Marxism—approached with no intention at revision—is a valid theory that calls for certain adjustments. His aspiration, even if unintended, is a correction and criticism of de Man's superficial categorization. Whereas de Man finds in Marxism the deterministic logic of eighteenth-century natural science, which analogy justifies its psychological refinement, for József the notion of law is always bound to society and history.     

Fast Activism: Resisting Mobile Policies

“Fast” urban policy is increasingly common as city leaders draw on globally mobile policy models to accelerate the policymaking process. Critics have responded with new types of “fast activism” strategies. Fast activists plan temporary and strategically timed campaigns, use relationally local messaging that jumps between global and local political critiques, and organise ideologically diverse coalitions to mobilise quickly against policy proposals. This was observed in protest campaigns against Olympic bids in Boston (USA) and Hamburg (Germany). Protesters successfully opposed mega‐event planning in both cities by combining all three tactics within a short period of time. The paper presents a comparative study of the Boston and Hamburg protests, drawing from qualitative fieldwork on the campaigns in both cities. The paper contributes by conceptualising an emerging mode of urban opposition, and by evaluating how this type of resistance changes local receptions of fast and mobile urban policy.     

Going West and Going Out: discourses,migrants, and models in Chinese development

Abstract

In 1999 China announced the launching of the Open up the West campaign, sometimes called “Going West,” to help western China finally catch up to the much wealthier eastern, coastal areas after several decades of lagging behind. The same year, China also announced a “Going Out” strategy to encourage Chinese investment abroad. The 15 years since then have witnessed dramatic Chinese government investment in various development activities in western regions of China, as well as around the world. Though rarely considered together, we argue that there are significant parallels in development discourse, the centrality of physical infrastructure, the characteristics of Chinese labor migration and the nature of migrant-local relations, and the application of “models from elsewhere” in Going West and Going Out. Considering these parallels can help shed light on Chinese development discourse and practice, as China becomes increasingly important in the field of development once dominated by Western countries. Finally, we also consider direct connections and convergences between the two strategies in China’s neighboring countries of Asia and in the One Belt One Road initiative.     

PUTTING WOMEN IN THEIR PLACE: THE CARNIVAL AT GREENHAM COMMON*

In this paper I examine reactions to the Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp. I argue that the media, local and government responses to the Greenham women reveal geographical assumptions about “normality.” The peace women, by living away from home, on the edge of a military (and therefore masculine) establishment challenged accepted patriarchal understandings of “women's place” and were thus described as “out of place.” More specifically, the women were referred to in terms of hygiene, inadequate culinary ability, sexuality and hysteria. Each of these implies a gendered form of disorder in which social, cultural and geographical boundaries have been transgressed. These reactions are placed within the context of Bakhtin's formulations of the carnivalesque and grotesque realism. I suggest that the women, through their highly visible opposition to a patriarchal military establishment, represent a threat to neatly bounded official culture which finds its geographical expression in the formal territories of the courtroom and the air base. In conclusion this illustration is placed in the wider context of cultural/political protest. I argue that transgression, while serving to reveal normally assumed hegemonic landscapes, is restrained by already existing boundaries.     

La Société des Nations suppose la Société des Esprits: The Debate on Modern Humanism

This article focuses on the themes of the two conferences organized by the League of Nations—“Modern Man” and “The Foundations of Modern Humanism”—which were held in Nice and Budapest in 1935 and 1936, respectively. It was a time of deepening crisis, when the pervasive belief was that European civilization was declining. The more specific questions discussed in these conferences included the relation of modern man to the state, the impact of irrational theories on modern life, and the need for free education for everyone. Renowned writers and academics of the period participated in the debates, among them Thomas Mann, Jules Romains, Salvador de Madariaga, Alfred Zimmern, and Johan Huizinga. I present a critical overview of their debates, beginning with Paul Valéry, the initiator and chairman of these conferences, who coined the intriguing slogan “La Société des Nations suppose la Société des Esprits.”     

Neuroscience and the fallacies of functionalism

Smail's "On Deep History and the Brain" is rightly critical of the functionalist fallacies that have plagued evolutionary theory, sociobiology, and evolutionary psychology. However, his attempt to improve on these efforts relies on functional explanations that themselves oversimplify the lessons of neuroscience. In addition, like explanations in evolutionary psychology, they are highly speculative and cannot be confirmed or disproved by evidence. Neuroscience research is too diverse to yield a single picture of brain functioning. Some recent developments in neuroscience research, however, do suggest that cognitive processing provides a kind of “operating system” that can support a great diversity of cultural material. These developments include evidence of “top-down” processing in motor control, in visual processing, in speech recognition, and in “emotion regulation.” The constraints that such a system may place on cultural learning and transmission are worth investigating. At the same time, historians are well advised to remain wary of the pitfalls of functionalism.     

Archaeology, Development and Conflict: A Case Study from the African Continent

Apart from wars, other contexts of social conflict have recently become a setting in which archaeologists are faced with acute, sometimes armed, violence. On the African continent, a region often overlooked in discussions of “archaeology in conflict”, rapid economic development has led to several such scenes. The paper discusses a particularly poignant example from the Middle Nile valley in Sudan, where large dam projects have been met with various levels of opposition by affected populations. Local communities opposing the construction of further planned dams on the Nile are increasingly stressing ‘cultural survival’ and fear of ‘developmental genocide’ as two of their major motivations for fighting these projects. Assuming a close link between the developer and archaeological salvage missions, affected people have started to use the expulsion of salvage teams from their territory as a strategy of resistance—posing an ethical dilemma for the archaeologists who struggle to find a position in the increasingly violent controversies accompanying these contested development projects.     

Max Stirner,Hegel and the Young Hegelians: A reassessment

Max Stirner is generally considered a nihilist, anarchist, precursor to Nietzsche, existentialism and even post-structuralism. Few are the scholars who try to analyse his stands from within its Young Hegelian context without, however, taking all his references to Hegel and the Young Hegelians as expressions of his own alleged Hegelianism. This article argues in favour of a radically different reading of Stirner considering his magnum opus “Der Einzige und sein Eigentum” as in part a carefully constructed parody of Hegelianism deliberately exposing its outwornness as a system of thought. Stirner's alleged Hegelianism becomes intelligible when we consider it as a formal element in his criticism of Bauer's philosophy of self-consciousness. From within this framework it becomes quite clear what Stirner meant with such notions as “ownness” and “egoism”. They were part of his radical criticism of the implicit teleology of Hegelian dialectics as it found according to him its highmark in Bauer. In short, this article puts the literature on Stirner into question and tries for the first time in 30 years to dismantle Stirner's entire undertaking in “Der Einzige und sein Eigentum” by considering it first and foremost a radical criticism of Hegelianism and eventually the whole of philosophy while fully engaged in the debates of his time.     

"九一八"事变后日本"亚洲主义"意识形态的政策化

近代日本的“亚洲主义”并非一定以对抗欧美为根本目的,因而它与所谓的“协调主义”路线之间并不存在绝对的对立。这意味着“亚洲主义”意识形态的政策化存在着可能性。尤其在“九一八”事变之后的特殊历史背景下,它自下而上,由日本陆海军、外务省等各分支机构到最高首脑决策,经历了一个逐渐向外交国策渗透发展并最终讨论成型的复杂过程。可以说1933年斋藤内阁“五相会议”所制定的《外交方针》正是其政策化的典型表现。该方针将“协调主义”作为辅助手段,明确宣布今后日本的国策在于“实现帝国指导下日、满、华的提携共助”。这意味着“不放弃协调主义的亚洲主义政策”在当时已告形成。     

The Idea of Epilepsy as a Disease Per Se

In the 1850s Delasiauve and Russell Reynolds independently introduced the idea that the previously more inclusive concept of “epilepsy” should be restricted to that of an idiopathic disease manifesting epileptic seizures not caused by detectable brain pathology. This idea was rather widely accepted, though with some modification, over much of the next century. However there was increasing opposition to the idea from those, including John Hughlings Jackson, who perceived that all epileptic seizures must be symptoms of underlying brain disease. With increasing identification of structural brain pathology in what had been regarded as instances of idiopathic epilepsy, the latter view has increasingly prevailed.