Theory, Culture & Society current issue

Capitalizing Disease: Biopolitics of Drug Trials in India

Prasad, A. — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 06:34:15 PDT

Recent success of Indian engineers, businessmen, as well as other technically qualified professionals has created an obsession with knowledge and creativity. Documents like India as a Knowledge Superpower have proliferated and we continually hear the mantra of investing in and harnessing of human capital. There are, however, several strands of human capital in India and not all of them harness knowledge and creativity. People on whom drugs are being tested represent one such human capital, which, even though it is being energetically mobilized to provide India with a strategic advantage in the world market, also highlights the contradictions within India’s shifting imaginary, economy and politics. Drug trials in India, in the context of neoliberal globalization, not only challenge and complicate, but also operate within a constellation of divisions — labor/capital, west/non-west, colonial/sovereign, national/global and so on. In this article I analyze how the people on whom drug testing is being done in India are being ‘harnessed’ as human capital, which leads to politicization of ‘bare life’ through ‘inclusive-exclusion’.

The Resurrection of the Image

Jackson, K. — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 06:34:15 PDT

In this article I wish to elucidate a form of receptivity in our relation to televisual images that cannot be reduced to the postmodern formula of a closed circuit of desire through which the self(same) infinitely reproduces itself. Through analysis of the peculiar experience of viewing Gore Verbinski’s 2003 film The Ring (a remake of Hideo Nakata’s Ring), I argue for the possibility of an experience of alterity in and through the televisual. I pair this event with the religious experience of viewing the icon that Jean-Luc Marion opposes to the televisual in his recent works collected in The Crossing of the Visible. The purpose of the comparison is not to conflate the two experiences but rather to suggest that the possibility for reclaiming a space for difference in a postmodern world lies within the televisual itself, the very medium that Marion credits with the bankruptcy of the aesthetic. In The Ring, the process through which the viewer expects to see her own desire reproduced is violently interrupted by a vengeful image that shatters the mirror of reflection between viewer and viewed and threatens to cross over that threshold — to cross the visible, in Marion’s terms.

Another Politics of Life is Possible

Fassin, D. — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 06:34:15 PDT

Although it is usually assumed that in Michel Foucault’s work biopolitics is a politics which has life for its object, a closer analysis of the courses he gave at the Collège de France on this topic, as well as of the other seminars and papers of this period, shows that he took a quite different direction, restricting it to the regulation of population. The aim of this article is to return to the origins of the concept and to confront the issue of life as such. This implies four shifts with respect to Foucault’s theory: (1) Politics is not only about the rules of the game of governing, but also about its stakes. (2) More than the power over life, contemporary societies are characterized by the legitimacy they attach to life. (3) Rather than a normalizing process, the intervention in lives is a production of inequalities. (4) The politics of life, then, is not only a question of governmentality and technologies, but also of meaning and values. The discussion is grounded on a series of empirical investigations conducted in France and South Africa on how life and lives are treated in our world.

Is the World Social Forum a Transnational Public Sphere?: Nancy Fraser, Critical Theory and the Containment of Radical Possibility

Conway, J., Singh, J. — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 06:34:15 PDT

In a number of recent articles, Nancy Fraser attempts to understand the World Social Forum within the framework of critical democratic theory. In this article, we examine the descriptive and normative aspects of Fraser’s theoretical framework, and explore the effects of projecting it upon the World Social Forum. We argue that while this theory may elucidate some features of the Forum, many of the Forum’s most challenging and innovative aspects are obscured and limited by Fraser’s framework. Not only, then, does the World Social Forum elude Fraser’s conceptualization of it, but we suggest that the praxis of the Forum poses a number of serious challenges to Fraser’s critical theory of democracy and social justice.

The Sociology of Vocational Prizes: Recognition as Esteem

Heinich, N. — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 06:34:15 PDT

Artistic and scientific activities pertain to the world of ‘vocation’, which demonstrates a close relationship with recognition issues. Referring to recent trends in French, German and American sociology and political philosophy, this article addresses both the status of recognition in present-day sociology and the necessity of prizes in vocational activities. Grounded on two empirical surveys about literary and scientific prizes, it displays the various axiological problems raised by such a mode of recognition, as the ‘felicity conditions’ of this mode of recognition have to ensure a feeling of justice and avoid envious reactions. On a more theoretical ground, the article aims to demonstrate the necessity for sociology to shift, first, from material to ‘symbolic’ or, rather, ‘intangible’ outcomes; second, from a concern with power and domination to a concern with interdependency; and third, from recognition conceived as egalitarian respect to recognition conceived as un-egalitarian esteem.

Being-with: Georg Simmel's Sociology of Association

Pyyhtinen, O. — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 06:34:15 PDT

The article discusses Georg Simmel’s theorizing on the social in the light of his treatment of the ‘dyad’ and the ‘triad’, constellations of two and three elements. What makes the dyad and the triad particularly interesting is the fact that they express the difference between the primary intersubjectivity immanent to the individuals and the objectified social forms in numerical terms, as quantitatively determined. In the article, it is argued that in its basic, methodologically simplest form, the social amounts for Simmel to dyadic interaction between I and you, that can be conceptualized as ‘beingwith’. Nevertheless, a third element is always included also in the dyad, be it only as an excluded third. Therefore, it is claimed that in order to fully understand the dynamics of social relationships, one must look at the interplay of two socio-logics, bivalent and trivalent. The ‘third’ not only interrupts the supposedly immediate relation between the two elements of the dyad, but it is also capable of transforming it into a completely new figure: a social whole, a ‘we’, which obtains a supra-individual life independent of the individuals.

What is a Pipe?: Obama and the Sociological Imagination

Cetina, K. K. — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 06:34:15 PDT

This article is an attempt to make sociological sense of the 2008 American election — particularly of the phenomenological observation of extraordinary enchantment and almost amorous attraction which unlikely members of the American population displayed for Obama, from the early days of the campaign onward. I draw on charisma theory to argue that sociology has something surprising to say on the phenomenon, and on the metaphor of the pipe to add detail about the technology of attraction that was in play.

After the Ball Is Over: Bourdieu and the Crisis of Peasant Society

Robbins, D. — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 06:34:15 PDT

This review article is stimulated by the publication by Polity Press in 2008 of a translation of Bourdieu’s Le Bal des célibataires, which had been published by Editions du Seuil in the year of his death — 2002. Le Bal des célibataires assembled three articles about his native Béarn which Bourdieu had written at roughly ten-year intervals, starting in 1962. Given that Le Bal des célibataires formally constitutes a new publication in that it juxtaposes the three earlier articles, adds a short introduction and republishes, as an appendix, a methodological article first published in the 1970s, the 2002 text provides access to four stages in the development of Bourdieu’s reflexive analysis of traditional society (dating from 1962, 1972, 1989 and 2002). The article draws attention to some of the objective socio-economic changes in Béarn society in the second half of the 20th century and asks whether the autonomous logic of Bourdieu’s conceptual development in this period was the product of his partisan participation in an originally traditional situation and whether his maintenance of this logic over time was a device to give scientific legitimation to that situation. Consideration of these microcosmic analyses of the Béarn raises questions relevant to international socio-economic development in general, about whether sociology is equipped to offer a scientific explanation of economic and technological changes in society or whether, by definition, it is categorally committed to a conservative value-orientation which criticizes ‘post-human’ postmodernity.

Book Review: Who Sings the Nation-State?: Judith Butler and Gayatri Spivak Calcutta, New York, Oxford: Seagull Books, 2007, pp. 121

Bell, V. — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 06:34:15 PDT

Book Review: Translation, Biopolitics, Colonial Difference (Traces) edited by Naoki Sakai and Jon Solomon Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2006

Heydon, J. — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 06:34:15 PDT