… work in progress in social theory and cultural sociology

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 Ethic and the Structural Romanticism of Money

glimpses: the eccentricity of the romantic consumer: campbell, simmel, and plessner, Rousseau the Puritan?, Consumer eccentricity and subjectivity fetish, The Ancient Mariner Goes Hollywood, Consumer Daydreams and Kierkegaard’s Sickness unto Death,

(3) Anatolian Sufi Capitalism – From Islamic Calvinists to Consumer Islam

glimpses: The Sufi ethics and the spirits of consumerism: A preliminary suggestion for further research, Sufi dream cinema, Sufi urbanism – Rumi and Marx against the idiocy of rural life…, Futuwwah and the value of a penny, sufi and cinematic imagination, Commerce of the Soul – a Mevlevi line, Islamisation as Westernisation?, Pokémon, Islam, Consumerism, Israel, and the Cult of the Individual (in no particular order)

II Haunted Capitalism/Ghosts of Original Accumulation

(4) Postcolonial Angst and Ethical Consumption (Ghosts of Empire)

glimpses: The Fear of the Fairtrade Consumer – An Informed Guess on a Form of Consumer Anxiety, Post-colonial Guilt and Anti-conquest,  “Die Moralisierung des Konsums ist von Furcht getrieben.” – Fair Trade und die postkolonialen Statusängste von Konsumenten., Consuming the campesino: fair trade marketing between recognition and romantic commodification, Ethical Consumption: The Case of Fair Trade,

(5) Inequality and Violence in the City (Ghosts of Enclosure)

glimpses: Veblen’s Labor Day, money-recognition (Adorno/Horkheimer), Veblen in the Inner City: Sense of Entitlement and the Normality of Looting – A Reply to Iain Duncan Smith, Reciprocity, Recognition and Labor Value: Marx’s Incidental Moral Anthropology of Capitalist Market Exchange, Waste, Industry and Romantic Leisure: Veblen’s Theory of Recognition,

(6) Wounds of Accelerated Development (Ghosts of Empire and Republic – the Case of Turkey)

glimpses: Süleymaniyye in London, İnce Memed and Paternalism

III Whistful Capitalism/Dreaming Post-Capitalist Futures

(7) Dreaming the Absolute – Totalitarian Nightmares

glimpses: Stromlinienlimousine, Geneva to Moscow, totalitarian potential in Gramsci?,White Rose antifascist globalism, The fatal attraction of Jacobinism: Žižek as Robespierre,

(8) Dreaming in the Subjunctive – Libertarian-Socialist Implications of Advanced Consumer Capitalism

glimpses:Towards a Consumerist Critique of Capitalism (and a Socialist Defence of Consumer Culture),  consumerism into fascism (part 1), expropriation of the brickolariat (Lego), Le nez rouge de Durkheim, Becoming vs Being – Towards an anti-Heideggerian and post-Platonic Ontology of Fashion – A Preliminary Note, Stonier’s “microelectronic revolution” – a forgotten concept?, socialism and consumer choice,

(9) The General Intellect in Action: Gezi and the Summer of ‘13

glimpses: consumerism as folk religion?, Ziya Gökalp, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and the two Emile Durkheims,