… work in progress in social theory and cultural sociology

Kardeşin duymaz, eloğlu duyar Hybridity and alterity are concepts that feature highly in cosmopolitan critiques of culturalist (including multi-culturalist) projections of homogeneity in a drive against classificatory thinking (e.g. Çağlar 1997). Cosmopolitanism can be characterised as a universalist-liberal project opposed to a more communitarian multiculturalism. Cosmopolitanism tries to evade the danger of reifying racial, ethnic ...

[footnotes at the end of this post – links don’t work…] As Simmelian/Bermanian Marxist, Plessner fan and antifascist, I have a deep aversion against the protagonists of the proto-fascist “conservative revolution” (konservative Revolution) in the Weimar Republic – people like “jurist” Carl Schmitt, the essayist and “novelist” Ernst Jünger, the “historian” Oswald Spengler … and ...

As I am gearing up to re-working my paper on Plessner’s notion of eccentricity and Campbell’s analysis of romantic consumer selfhood I notice that a reference to Sennett’s Fall of Public Man is not quite contemporary enough to highlight the concerns about the dissolution from ceremonial division of (mostly public) roles and the (mostly private) ...

An excellent article by Alan Johnson on the world after Oslo in World Affairs Journal. Here is his conclusion: When the terrible news broke, I recalled the summers I spent at the British Labour Party Young Socialist summer camp in the beautiful Forest of Dean, working-class kids drowning in honey as surely as Evelyn Waugh’s ...

(Paper presented at the 4th International Plessner Conference, 16th to 18th September, Erasmus University, Rotterdam, The Netherlands) pdf Consumer culture has few defenders and there are even fewer who dare to argue that consumer culture may in a sense make us broader and deeper personalities. In this talk I will try to make the case ...