Most of the posts and any new ones can now be found on my new blog metaxý – fragments in cultural sociology and social theory. For the next twelve months or so I will be using it to put down scraps and sketches for my book-to-be Ghosts of Capitalism Past, Present and Yet-to-come. You can also follow ...
(0) Introduction: The Reality of Ghosts – a Materialist View glimpses: Benjamin Franklin as ghost, in-betweenness, vestibules, rhizomes, in-between: Ibn Arabi and Georg Simmel, Names, Mystics, and Consumer Immortality I Spirited Capitalism (1) Inspiring Capitalism: the Protestant Ethic and Base/Superstructure Reloaded glimpses: Marx/Weber/Darwin, elective affinities & base/superstructure, spirit of capitalism and fordist daydreams, snippet on base/superstructure, base/superstructure: Gramsci on Berlusconi, (2) Inspiring Consumerism: the Romantic ...
In this first part I will argue that romantic consumerism is decidedly non-heroic and intuitively anti-totalitarian – I will try and explore the potential for totalitarian reversals in the second part. I have argued that the now habitual condemnation of consumer culture as the central evil of contemporary capitalism is misguided and potentially reactionary. But there are ...
Much of an era’s social, cultural and political aspects are coagulated in the cars it produced. So much of early 1960s France is conserved in the Citroën DS famously analysed in Roland Barthes’s Mythes. Two features stand out in la Déesse: The achievement of beauty by seamlessness of form and the civility of a homely interior that it ...
It is often noted that Marx was a great admirer of Darwin, but it has been rarely explored what he actually took from him into his own theory, let alone put to productive use by his followers. There are exceptions, though. Mark Warren (1987: 258) shows that Marx thought of technological progress as well as ...
Our students kindly featured some of my ramblings on their blog. I reference jack wills as one of the looks often encountered on campus. It is a most intriguing phenomenon. Of course: all I know about that I’ve learned from Daniel Smith… There’s a book in the offing as well. ...
„Es ist mit den Geschäften wie mit dem Tanze; Personen, die gleichen Schritt halten, müssen sich unentbehrlich werden; ein wechselseitiges Wohlwollen muß notwendig daraus entstehen…“ [It is with business as it is with dance; persons who are in step with each other, will inevitably become indispensible for each other. A mutual benevolence will arise with ...
This is a random association triggered by learning that the old Turkic word for “sky” and “god” Tengri (the origin of the Turkish term Tanrı – often preferred by Anatolian Sufis) and the Chinese ti’en, meaning the same, may share an etymology. I found two snippets from either tradition involving geese – and they are ...
There is a strange and largely unnoticed return of Orientalism into the social-scientific debate. The anti-rationalist turn against what often is perceived to be a continued stranglehold of Cartesian mind-body dualism now often seeks to ally itself with ‘Eastern thought’. The most startling precedent of poststructuralist Orientalism of course is to be found in Gilles ...
Current Capitalism is in crisis. This is well known. Capitalism always is in crisis. From early on capitalism was experienced as unsettling, unbalancing and unstable. Gone was the cherished Aristotelian feudal/aristocratic ideal of moderation (σωφροσύνη) which locates virtuous behaviour in the considered middle (μεσότης) of two vices or excesses. It was replaced by an ever ...