… work in progress in social theory and cultural sociology

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 ...

(updated 9th November 2012) Daniel Smith has an interesting piece on vlogging celebrity in which the issue of subjectivity fetishism and, related to this, how what’s in name is quite important in terms how we construct selfhood. I have already put down some of my thoughts about the implications of the subjectivity fetish, referring to ...