Whose City? A study of the colonisation of the

 city and the emancipation of urban space.

James Moulding

Abstract

The aim of this study is to investigate the applicability of utilizing Jurgen Habermas's Colonisation Thesis as a tool for analysing urban space and exploring problems within the contemporary city. In the first part the paper outlines the importance of focusing our attentions upon the city and constructing a conceptual framework! for understanding urban space. The work then outlines the theoretical framework of Habermas's Colonisation Thesis before an attempt to transpose this onto our understanding of urban space. The thesis concludes on an exploration of decolonisation and sociospatial change through both situationist theory and the lived experience of urban revolution uniting theory and practice.

SEE  https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/search?q=HABERMAS

Public Space in the Post Capitalist City

M. Mac A Bhàillidh

This document forms part of an investigation into the definition of public space in the contemporary city and the nature of its ownership and control. The research and conclusions developed in this text are explored in conjunction with a series of design exercises, considered in the context of the city of Perth.

The role of public space in the city is a topical issue in the wider climate of economic downturn and political protest, as well as in the site specific context of Perth’s recently reinstated city status, and related discussion over the demolition or reuse of a number of the city’s significant former public buildings. The legal disputes and discussion over the Occupy protests, viewed alongside the congruous debate over the demolition of Perth City Hall, creates an intriguing and fluid backdrop for this research.

The Ecological Colonization of Space

Environmental History, 2005

Peder Anker

This article claims that the prospect of space colonization has been of significant importance with respect to ecological debate, methodology and practice. Cabin ecological research of the improvement of submarines and underground shelters serves as the background for understanding the emergence of the “carrying capacity” concept adopted by the space program of the 1960s. Ecologists involved in space research aimed at constructing cabin ecological systems for spaceships that were subsequently used as models to understand Spaceship Earth. Space colonies came to represent the rational, orderly, and wisely managed contrast to the irrational, disorderly, and ill managed Earth. Human environmental and moral space was to be reordered according to the ideals of cabin ecology and the astronaut’s life in outer space. Despite criticisms of the managerial ethics of space colonization in the mid 1970s, cabin ecology and space technology have became important tools for ecological management. Biosphere 2 was built in Arizona as a prototype for future colonies on Mars, for example. It currently serves as a model for how humans should live within Biosphere 1 (the Earth). The challenge of today is how to get out of the intellectual capsule that ecologists have created for environmentally concerned humanists..

Publication Date: 2005

Publication Name: Environmental History

ABOUT AUTHOR

Peder Anker

1

New York University

Faculty Member

Peder Anker’s teaching and research interests lie in the history of science, ecology, environmentalism and design, as well as environmental philosophy. He has received research fellowships from the Fulbright Program, the Dibner Institute and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, and been a visiting scholar at both Columbia University and University of Oslo. He is the co-author of Global Design: Elsewhere Envisioned (Prestel, 2014) together with Louise Harpman and Mitchell Joachim. He is also the author of From Bauhaus to Eco-House: A History of Ecological Design (Louisiana State University Press 2010), which explores the intersection of architecture and ecological science, and Imperial Ecology: Environmental Order in the British Empire, 1895-1945 (Harvard University Press, 2001), which investigates how the promising new science of ecology flourished in the British Empire. Professor Anker’s current book project explores the history of ecological debates in his country of birth, Norway. Peder Anker received his PhD in history of science from Harvard University in 1999. He is Associate Professor at the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at New York University.

Steps to an Ecology of Systems: Whole Earth and Systemic Holism

Addressing Modernity: Social Systems Theory and U.S. Cultures,

 eds. Hannes Bergthaller and Carsten Schinko (Amsterdam: Rodopi), 259-88., 2011

Bruce Clarke

In this essay I give the term holism some precision as naming a

systems discourse that is still framed to some extent in a traditional

part/whole manner, and which, as a consequence, encounters the

problematics of totalization. With some important exceptions, holism

 in this sense is still at work in many of the American-based

cybernetics and systems discourses that run from 1968-71 through

 the expanding iterations of the Whole Earth Catalog, and from 

1974-84 through its quarterly journalistic spin-off, CoEvolution Quarterly. 

Visions of global unity are accorded ultimate value. As parts of the

 biosphere, organisms, species, societies, and their technologies may

 co-evolve, but it is the whole Earth that gathers them into an ecological

 union rendered as a singular totality. This holistic, counter-reductionist

 orientation was both out in front of mainstream scientific and

 social thinking – countercultural in the best sense – and at the same

 time, prone to certain theoretical equivocations and impasses tha

t Niklas Luhmann’s work both illuminates and goes beyond.

Publication Date: 2011

Publication Name: Addressing Modernity: Social Systems Theory and U.S. Cultures, eds. Hannes Bergthaller and Carsten Schinko (Amsterdam: Rodopi), 259-88.Show less ▴

Buckminster Fuller

Social Systems Theory

Gregory Bateson

Whole Earth Catalog

ABOUT AUTHOR

Bruce Clarke

2.0

Texas Tech University
Faculty Member

Paul Whitfield Horn Professor of Literature and Science and former chair in the Department of English at Texas Tech University. Research focuses on 19th- and 20th-century literature and science, with special interests in systems theory, narrative theory, and ecology. 2010-11 Senior Fellow at the International Research Institute for Cultural Technologies and Media Philosophy (IKKM), Bauhaus-University Weimar. Edits the book series Meaning Systems: http://fordhampress.com/index.php/series-imprints/series/meaning-systems.html

What is the Legacy of the Situationist International to the Critical Understanding of the Modern Urban Environment?

Charlie Hawksfield

In this way the Heygate estate was ahead of the game, its maze of walkways and tunnels
create a mesh of weaving paths around the estate and under the Elephant and Castle roundabout.

They are playful and irrational, some curve gracefully up to the first floor level (see figure 3)
others jut out of the blocks over the street like exterior staircases. In the tunnels under the traffic, artwork has been scrawled crudely on the walls, with the dripping ceilings and the roar of traffic. They fit neatly into the Situationist’s Unitary Urbanism model.
Constant wrote in Another City for Another Life- “we envisage covered cities in which
the layout of roads and separate buildings will be replaced by a continuous spatial construction elevated above the ground, including clusters of dwellings as well as public spaces” (Constant 1959). This is exactly what Tim Tinker had in mind when he designed the car parks, walkways and public spaces. He made the street obsolete, created unconventional elevated spaces connected by imaginative routes. I think Constant especially would have loved aspects of the Heygate estate (from certain angles it even looks like some of his designs for New Babylon).

These small innovations make the Heygate different from the French modernism of Le
Corbusier. Yes the blocks are built for household comfort, and the architecture is unbelievably ugly, but there is a sense of play here, and the galleries, walkways and tunnels should have set up lively social interactions. So where did it all go wrong?

SEE  https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/search?q=SITUATIONISM

SEE  https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/search?q=SITUATIONIST+INTERNATIONAL

SEE  https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/search?q=SI

THE SITUATIONIST CITY & BEACH BENEATH THE STREETS

https://www.academia.edu/7980761/The_Situationist_City_MIT_Press_1998_

The Varieties of Capitalist Experience

Peggy Deamer, ed., Architecture and Capitalism: 1845 to the Present, New York: Routledge, 2013

Simon Sadler

During the formative years of today’s senior architects and educators in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the architectural discipline faced seismic developments in political economy and culture. Architectural education was drawn to the way that the New Left (led out, from Paris, by situationists) and counterculture (led out by hippies in the West of the US) located political consciousness close to architecture’s disciplinary heart in design, aesthetics, and everyday life. After 1968, partly in response to counterculture, architecture schools reconsidered the making of the architect and architectural culture, yet the discipline also prevented design from becoming the instrument of total revolution that the counterculture demanded. The cleft between capitalism and counterculture, in which architecture was wedged by the late 1960s, instead prompted the discipline to reassert its relative autonomy from political economy and assimilate counterculture.

Publication Date: 2013

Publication Name: Peggy Deamer, ed., Architecture and Capitalism: 1845 to the Present, New York: Routledge

The Beach Beneath the Street

2011

McKenzie Wark

A fresh history of the Situationist International by the author of A Hacker Manifesto.

Over fifty years after the Situationist International appeared, its legacy continues to inspire activists, artists and theorists around the world. Such a legend has accrued to this movement that the story of the SI now demands to be told in a contemporary voice capable of putting it into the context of twenty-first-century struggles.

McKenzie Wark delves into the Situationists' unacknowledged diversity, revealing a world as rich in practice as it is in theory. Tracing the group's development from the bohemian Paris of the '50s to the explosive days of May '68, Wark's take on the Situationists is biographically and historically rich, presenting the group as an ensemble creation, rather than the brainchild and dominion of its most famous member, Guy Debord. Roaming through Europe and the lives of those who made up the movement—including Constant, Asger Jorn, Michèle Bernstein, Alex Trocchi and Jacqueline De Jong—Wark uncovers an international movement riven with conflicting passions.

Accessible to those who have only just discovered the Situationists and filled with new insights, The Beach Beneath the Street rereads the group's history in the light of our contemporary experience of communications, architecture, and everyday life. The Situationists tried to escape the world of twentieth-century spectacle and failed in the attempt. Wark argues that they may still help us to escape the twenty-first century, while we still can ...

The book's jacket folds out into a poster, Totality for Beginners, a collaborative graphic essay employing text selected by McKenzie Wark with composition and drawings by Kevin C. Pyle.

Publication Date: 2011

Beneath the Street, a Preface

Ben Brucato

"This ‘interactive commentary’ is a hybrid of a review of The Beach Beneath the Street and an interview with its author, Mckenzie Wark. His book profiles the beginnings of the Situationist International in 1957 through an organizational split in 1962. Outside of the tradition of past histories of the Situationists, Wark avoids the stories of ‘great men’ and their works. Instead, his book charts an intellectual history of the movement and characters heretofore marginalized. In conversation with Wark, we find the motivation behind his attention toward the Situationists, their relevance to his body of work, and to our political moment. Much of current Marxist theory retains the totalitarian legacy of Lenin and Mao; the Situationists offer an alternative pathway for distinctly critical and libertarian theory. While contemporary cultural theorists have maintained the prominence of Lacan, Althusser, and Foucault, Wark aims for renewed attention to Lefebvre, Jorn, and Debord.

Review of McKenzie Wark’s The Beach beneath the Street 

by Anthony Hayes

 McKenzie Wark’s

The Beach beneath the Street: The Everyday Life and Glorious Times of theSituationist International

 is full of factual errors, a few of which I have drawn attention to in the review below. However the most appalling aspect of the book is in terms of its interpretative logic. Wark disguises his opinion by making historical figures act as his mouthpiece, whether that is Asger Jorn, Alexander Trocchi or even Guy Debord at times. Wark offers nothing new in terms of commentary and also pointedly fails to make good his promise of demonstrating the ‘contemporary resonance’ of aspects of the SI’s activity. The book is a poor introduction to the SI and anyone seeking such from it should instead seek out the writings of the SI themselves—most of them are available in English translation at the following sites:

Bureau of Public Secrets, NotBored! and Situationist International Online. The problem that people who are not familiar with preservationists face in reading Wark is that Wark’s substantive position is to be discovered in what he does not say and

leaves out  in order to fashion an account favourable to his barely concealed bias, in this case the boring old chestnut of favouring the so-called ‘artistic’ SI.

Utopia and/or Spectacle: Rethinking Urban Interventions Through the Legacy of Modernism and the Situationist City

Architectural Theory Review, 2011

Lara Schrijver

The Situationist International introduced the creative, psychological, desiring individual as a counterweight to the utopian schemes of the modernist city. The resistance formulated throughout situationist principles underlies many contemporary activist urban practices. Nevertheless, the situationist approach to the city incorporated an affirmation of utopian thought. This totalizing aspect of modernist thought, still present in contemporary discourse, constrains our understanding of the potential of micro-interventions in the city. Although the “right to the city” may be crucial to reclaiming an active engagement with our urban environment, this paper discusses some limitations of situationist ideas, arguing that current urban practice requires a new discourse beyond the by now well-known frame of resistance and negation.

More Info: This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Architectural Theory Review on 13 December, 2011, available online: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13264826.2011.621545

Journal Name: Architectural Theory Review

Publication Date: 2011

Publication Name: Architectural Theory Review

SEE  https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/search?q=SI

SEE  https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/search?q=SITUATIONISM

SEE  https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/search?q=SITUATIONIST+INTERNATIONAL

SEE  https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/search?q=ANARCHISM

A Genealogy and Critique of Guy Debord's Theory of Spectacle - PhD Thesis

Cover of the 1983 edition of Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle

PhD Thesis, Goldsmiths, University of London, 2011

Tom Bunyard
This thesis addresses Guy Debord's theory of spectacle through its primary philosophical and theoretical influences. Through doing so it highlights the importance of his largely overlooked concerns with time and history, and interprets the theory on that basis. The theory of spectacle is shown to be not simply a critique of the mass media, as is often assumed, but rather an account of a relationship with history; or more specifically, an alienated relation to the construction of history. This approach thus offers a means of addressing Debord’s Hegelian Marxism. The thesis connects the latter to Debord’s interests in strategy, chance and play by way of its existential elements, and uses these themes to investigate his own and the Situationist International’s (S.I.) concerns with praxis, political action and organisation.
Addressing Debord and the S.I.’s work in this way also highlights the shortcomings of the theory of spectacle. The theory is based upon the separation of an acting subject from his or her own actions, and in viewing capitalist society under this rubric it tends towards replacing Marx's presentation of capital as an antagonistic social relation with an abstract opposition between an alienated consciousness and a homogenised world. Yet whilst the theory itself may be problematic, the conceptions of time, history and subjectivity that inform it may be of greater interest. Drawing attention to Debord's claims that theories should be understood as strategic interventions, and also to the S.I.'s calls for their own supersession, the thesis uses its observations on the nature of Debord's Hegelian Marxism to cast the theory of spectacle as a particular moment within a broader notion of historical agency. It thus contends that Debord's work can be seen to imply a model of collective political will, and offers initial suggestions as to how that interpretation might be developed.

Publication Name: PhD Thesis, Goldsmiths, University of London, 2011

How the Situationist International became

 what it was

Anthony Hayes

The Situationist International (1957-1972) was a small group of
communist revolutionaries, originally organised out of the West
European artistic avant-garde of the 1950s. The focus of my
thesis is to explain how the Situationist International (SI)
became a group able to exert a considerable influence on the
ultra-left criticism that emerged during and in the wake of the
May movement in France in 1968. My wager is that the pivotal
period of the group is to be found between 1960 and 1963, a
period marked by the split of 1962. Often this is described as
the transition of the group from being more concerned with art to
being more concerned with politics, but as I will argue this
definitional shorthand elides the significance of the
Situationist critique of art, philosophy and politics.
The two axes of my thesis are as follows. First, that the
significant minority in the group which carried out the break of
1962, identified a homology between the earlier Situationist
critique of art — embodied in the Situationist ‘hypothesis of
the construction of situations’ — and Marx’s critique and
supersession of the radical milieu of philosophy from which he
emerged in the mid- 1840s. This homology was summarised in the
expression of the Situationist project as the ‘supersession of
art’ (dépassement de l’art). Secondly, this homology was
practically embodied in the resolution of the debates over the
role of art in the elaboration of the Situationist hypothesis,
which had been ongoing since 1957. However, it was the SI’s
encounter with the ultra-left group Socialisme ou Barbarie that
would prove decisive. Via Guy Debord’s membership, the group
was exposed to both the idea of a more general revolutionary
criticism, but also ultimately what was identified as the
insufficiently criticised ‘political militancy’ of this
group. Indeed, in the ‘political alienation’ found in
Socialisme ou Barbarie, a further homology was established
between the alienation of the political and artistic
avant-gardes. This identity would prove crucial to the further
elaboration of the concept of ‘spectacle’.
By way of an examination of the peculiar and enigmatic ‘Hamburg
Theses’ of 1961, and the relationship between these
‘Theses’ and the Situationist criticism of art and politics
worked out over the first five years of the group, I will argue
that the break in 1962 should be conceived as one against
politics as much as art (rather than just the latter, as it is
more often represented). Additionally, I will outline how the SI,
through the paradoxical reassertion of their artistic origins,
attempted to synthesise their criticism of art with the recovery
of the work of Marx beyond its mutilation as Marxism. Indeed, it
was the synthesis of these critiques that enabled the
considerable development of the concept of ‘spectacle’,
opening the way to the unique influence the SI exerted in the
re-emergence of a revolutionary movement at the end of the 1960s.

Toward the realisation of philosophy: The Situationist International 

between 1957 and 1960

Three Situationists walk into a bar - Or, the peculiar case of the Hamburg Theses
Anthony Hayes

Guy Debord, filmmaker, Situationist and author of The Society of the Spectacle, called The Hamburg Theses ‘the most mysterious of all the documents that emanated from the Situationist International.’ What makes the Hamburg Theses most enigmatic, apart from the fleeting and elusive references made to them in the Situationist journal, is that they were never published — left to fade along with the memories of their ‘co-authors’. Nonetheless their significance to the group was paramount. The Theses were formulated in response to the crisis regarding the role of art and artistic practice within the group. In essence their apparent failure to appear was intended to reflect the Situationist project itself: the rejection of the fetish of objects and other forms of reified human activity beloved of capitalism. In the Hamburg Theses, then, we have the Situationist project expressed in its most concise and impossibly elusive form, making it one of the most vital works of the Situationist International.

Art, ideology, and everyday space: subversive tendencies from Dada to situationism

Alastair Bonnett

This is a paper about the transgression of the boundary between art and everyday
space. It traces the development of a practical and theoretical critique of this divide from
Dada and surrealism to situationism and postmodernism, whilst showing how these movements
have themselves often perpetuated a specialized notion of cultural production. The ultimate
failure of these movements, with the exception of situationism, to develop a coherent and
effective challenge to the dualism art—everyday space is related to their reliance upon the
artistic ideologies of antiart, indifference, and spontaneism.

More Info: Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 1992, volumo 10, pagos 69-86

SEE  https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/search?q=SITUATIONISM

SEE  https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/search?q=SITUATIONIST+INTERNATIONAL

SEE  https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/search?q=SI

SEE  https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/search?q=GUY+DEBORD

The Concept of the Self in Western Marxism

Richard Westerman
Assistant Professor, Dept. of Sociology
University of Alberta
rwesterm@ualberta.ca

Unpublished doctoral thesis on the ideas of freedom, self-consciousness, identity, and
experience as the basis of social critique in the thought of Georg Lukács, Theodor Adorno,
Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, and Walter Benjamin, amongst others.


Reification Revalued: Lukács's Phenomenology of Capitalism

Richard Westerman

Prospectus for a book offering a new phenomenological interpretation of the work of Georg Lukács. I interpret his work as a semantics of practice, in which the social being of objects is determined by the structural features of the relations and practices around them. These practices can be understood as intentional, and it is their form that determines the relation of subject to object. This implies that Lukács's theory does not rest on the expressive subject that many previous interpretations (including that of e.g. Habermas) have assumed.

I support this interpretation by tracing Lukács's early interest in Edmund Husserl, Emil Lask, Alois Riegl, and Konrad Fiedler in his so-called "Heidelberg Philosophy of Art" - an unfinished manuscript predating his conversion to Marxism.

I argue that this perspective on Lukács offers new ways to think about social movements, populism, reification, and the problems of late capitalism - and, moreover, has implications for the relation of society and nature.

The Social and the Natural (sample chapter from "Reification Revalued.")

Richard Westerman

This document is the sixth chapter of my book-length project, Reification Revalued: Lukács’s Phenomenology of Capitalism. The book as a whole offers a new reading of Lukács through the lens of his earlier attempts to write a philosophy of art while studying in Heidelberg between 1912 and 1918. Rediscovered and published after his death, these drafts reveal the young Lukács’s explicit engagement with a series of thinkers whose influence on his thought has been underexplored for too long – particularly Edmund Husserl, Emil Lask, Konrad Fiedler, and Alois Riegl.

I argue that his most important work of Marxist thought, History and Class Consciousness, drew heavily on the model of meaning that he developed in his earlier work. Lukács presents social being as a sphere in which objects are constituted as meaningful through a set of intentional practices that may be analysed phenomenologically. Earlier chapters in the book re-examine some of the central arguments of History and Class Consciousness through this lens – with a particular focus on his account of subjectivity. In this chapter, I try to apply this re-reading of Lukács to an area he paid relatively little explicit attention to – that of nature, and the relation between the social and the natural. To do so, I draw on two significant criticisms of HCC – that of Lukács himself in his final years, and that made more recently by Andrew Feenberg. While conceding that Lukács’s account is deficient in many regards, I suggest that there is more to his view than is normally allowed.

For more information on the book as a whole, please see the prospectus at http://goo.gl/bBhQyK

Populism and the Logic of Commodity Fetishism: Lukács's Theory of Reification and Authoritarian Leaders (full text)

Richard Westerman

The continued effects of the 2008 economic crisis and its aftershocks have contributed to the electoral collapse across the world of technocratic centrist parties that had come to dominate in the previous decades. In their place, a number of authoritarian populists such as Donald Trump and Rodrigo Duterte have risen, explicitly setting themselves against the logic of late capitalism. For Georg Lukács, such an opposition is integral to capitalism: he noted the conflicting tendencies in bourgeois thought towards fatalistic belief in an unalterable social system on the one hand, and an irrational faith in so-called ‘great men’ on the other. Drawing on Lukács’s analysis of the logic of the commodity structure as social form, I will explain this through the way capitalist society determines itself as rational in its abstract, quantifiable universality, and excludes all specific content as ‘irrational.’ In this way, I suggest, it symbolically defines its own antithesis – not a revolutionary proletariat, but a mystical nationalism based on a belief in a ‘spiritual’ unity.

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Henri Lefebvre and the Critical Theory of Society

Perspectives on Henri Lefebvre, 2018

Chris O'Kane

I provide a new perspective on Henri Lefebvre’s social theory

by examining his work in comparison to Adorno and Adornian critical social

theory, ultimately pointing to their contemporary relevance for the critical theory

of society. To do so, I first provide an overview of how Adorno’s critical social theory

utilizes Marx’s critique of fetishism to articulate a critique of the social constitution and constituent autonomous supraindividual social domination of contemporary capitalist society in his negative anthropological critique of the negative

totality of capitalist society. I then turn to reconstructing Lefebvre’s interpretation

of Marx and the role the former plays in his theory of social space. Here I argue

that Lefebvre mirrors Adorno’s critical theory of society; using his interpretation

of Marx’s critique of fetishism to critique the constitution and constituent domination of capitalist society. But as I also demonstrate, in contrast to Adorno’s

negative anthropology, Lefebvre’s critique of capitalist society proceeds from

the basis of a humanism that constantly opposes the extent of domination to its

inherently humane content. This leads me to show how Lefebvre’s interpretation

of Marx serves as the basis for his critique of social space, where I also focus on how Lefebvre ties his humanist interpretation of Marx to a romantic humanist

and expansive conception of alienation that problematically conflates a myriad

of quantitative types of domination whilst promoting an eclectic array of humane

types of resistance. Following this reconstruction, I draw on Alfred Schmidt and

Greig Charnock’s work on Lefebvre and Adornian critical theory, along with

my own comparative reconstruction, to point the contemporary relevance of a

Lefebvrian and Adornian infused critique of contemporary capitalist society.

Publication Date: 2018

Publication Name: Perspectives on Henri Lefebvre

Fetishism and Social Domination In Marx, Lukacs, Adorno and Lefebvre.

Chris O'Kane


This thesis presents a comparative account of the theory of fetishism and its role in the social constitution and constituent properties of Marx’s, Lukács’, Adorno’s and Lefebvre’s theories of social domination. It aims to bring this unduly neglected aspect of fetishism to the fore and to stress its relevance for contemporary critical theory.
The thesis begins with an introductory chapter that highlights the lack of a satisfactory theory of fetishism and social domination in contemporary critical theory. It also demonstrates how this notion of fetishism has been neglected in contemporary critical theory and in studies of Marxian theory.
This frames the ensuing comparative, historical and theoretical study in the substantive chapters of my thesis, which differentiates, reconstructs and critically evaluates how Marx, Lukács, Adorno and Lefebvre utilize the theory of fetishism to articulate their theories of the composition and characteristics of social domination. Chapter 1 examines Marx’s theory of fetish-characteristic forms of value as a theory of domination socially embedded in his account of the Trinity Formula. It also evaluates the theoretical and sociological shortcomings of Capital. Chapter 2 focuses on how Lukács’ double-faceted account of fetishism as reification articulates his Hegelian, Marxian, Simmelian and Weberian account of dominating social mystification. Chapter 3 turns to Adorno’s theory of the fetish form of the exchange abstraction and unpacks how it serves as a basis for his dialectical critical social theory of domination. Chapter 4 provides an account of how Lefebvre’s theory of fetishism as concrete abstraction serves as the basis for a number of theories that attempt to socially embody an account of domination that is not overly deterministic. The critical evaluations in chapters 2-4 interrogate each thinker’s conception of fetishism and its role in their accounts of the genesis and pervasiveness of social domination.
The conclusion of the thesis consists of three parts. In the first part, I
bring together and compare my analysis of Marx, Lukács, Adorno and Lefebvre. In part two, I consider whether their respective theories provide a coherent and cohesive critical social theory of fetishism and of the mode of constitution and the constituents of social domination. In part three, I move toward a contemporary critical theory of fetishism and social domination by synthesising elements of Lukács’, Adorno’s and Lefebvre’s theories with a model of social constitution, reproduction and domination modelled on Marx’s account of the Trinity Formula.

Marx and the Concept of Historical Time
2015

George Tomlinson


The guiding premise of this thesis is that the concept of historical time constitutes a distinct philosophical problem for Karl Marx’s work. Marx does not examine the relationship between time and history in his work, rendering the historicist framework of linear, progressive time the overriding framework through which he understands this relationship. However, the larger problem is that, despite this lack, the philosophical originality and critical function of Marx’s work is in no small measure defined by the contribution it makes towards our understanding of this relationship. Therefore, this thesis argues that it is necessary to construct a concept of historical time out of Marx’s work. Methodologically, this begins with an outline of the broad contours of the materialist concept of history in 'The German Ideology', and a temporal reading of the historical act – the creation of the means of human life – on which this concept is based. This reading is then ontologically grounded, first by Martin Heidegger’s 'Being and Time', in order to establish how the act as such temporalises, and then by Jean-Paul Sartre’s 'Critique of Dialectical Reason', in order to grasp how this temporalisation can be thought in relation to the movement of historical totalisation, which is to say the ongoing totalisation of the time of all human lives. In short, Heidegger and Sartre enable us to secure labour and need – the two concepts upon which the materialist concept of history depends – as the two basic forces upon which historical temporalisation depends. Yet if, as Marx’s 'Capital' reveals, the specifically capitalist category of ‘abstract labour’ is the condition of thinking the transhistorical category of ‘labour in general’, and if abstract labour exists to satisfy capital’s need to self-expand, not the human’s need to live, then capital – not the human – is the condition of thinking history. Capital and its times give history its intelligibility, such that capitalism is the only standpoint (to date) from which ‘history as such’, ‘history itself’, can be conceived. However, the concept of historical time cannot simply register that capital makes the category of history possible. It must also account for the historically changing character of the relationship between time and history, and hence the possibility of social and historical time after capitalism.

More Info: PhD Thesis
Organization: Kingston University
Publication Date: Oct 28, 2015