Theory, Culture and Society

The publication of Michel Foucault’s lectures at the Collège de France in the late 1970s has provided new insight into crucial developments in his late work, including the return to an analysis of the state and the introduction of biopolitics as a central theme. According to one dominant interpretation, these shifts did not entail a fundamental methodological break; the approach Foucault developed in his work on knowledge/power was simply applied to new objects. The present article argues that this reading — which is colored by the overwhelming privilege afforded to Discipline and Punish in secondary literature — obscures an important modification in Foucault’s method and diagnostic style that occurred between the introduction of biopolitics in 1976 (in Society Must Be Defended) and the lectures of 1978 ( Security, Territory, Population) and 1979 ( Birth of Biopolitics). Foucault’s initial analysis of biopolitics was couched in surprisingly epochal and totalizing claims about the characteristic forms of power in modernity. The later lectures, by contrast, suggest what I propose to call a ‘topological’ analysis that examines the ‘patterns of correlation’ in which heterogeneous elements — techniques, material forms, institutional structures and technologies of power — are configured, as well as the redeployments through which these patterns are transformed. I also indicate how attention to the topological dimension of Foucault’s analysis might change our understanding of key themes in his late work: biopolitics, the analysis of thinking, and the concept of governmentality.

Stephen J. Collier

Theory, Culture &amp; Society

Topologies of Power

The recent phenomenon of the export zone attracts scholarly attention primarily for its economic and political logics, yet it is as a cultural phenomenon that the Zone may ultimately signal its transformational role in the trajectory of state sovereignty and the global urban imagination. This article approaches the phenomenon of the Zone as a key location for understanding the social and cultural impact of globalization on urban space. It conceptually locates the trajectory of the export-oriented zone and its analogues to understand how, in little over 40 years, the phenomenon of the Zone experienced a rapid and veritable institutionalization as part of the topography and imagination of globalization. The first part traces the contours of the Zone as a territorial strategy that re-scales national economic and political space and enables the networked models of distributed production so critical to the global economy. The second part critically supplements the standard account by re-thinking the Zone as an incipient urban form — the Ex-City — that incorporates classically modernist fantasies in the context of contemporary logics of sovereignty and accumulation.

Jonathan Bach

Modernity and the Urban Imagination in Economic Zones

This article provides a framework by way of introduction to the special section, ‘The Urban Problematic II’. It introduces a new selection of papers contributing to the continuing project of interrogating concepts, processes and practices associated with contemporary forms of urban life. The article focuses in particular on the problem of infrastructure in relation to questions of urban politics and especially remarks on the emergence of a kind of thinking in which the separation of notions of material infrastructure from those of the social or cultural sphere can no longer be usefully maintained. The essays in the section cumulatively address the issue of an emergent hybridity of urban elements: the virtual and the material, the social and the technical, the political and the instrumental, the vertical and the horizontal. The spectacle of contemporary political activism and dissent emerges in the transformation of social and urban space.

Ryan Bishop

John W.P. Phillips

The Urban Problematic II

Bello, Walden (2002) Deglobalization: Ideas for a New Economy. London: Zed Books. Buey, Francisco Fernandez (2005) Guía para una globalización alternativa. Barcelona: Ediciones b. Fisher, William and Thomas Ponniah (eds) (2003) Another World is Possible: Popular Alternatives to Globalization at the World Social Forum. London: Zed Books. Houtart, François and François Polet (eds) (2001) The Other Davos: The Globalization of Resistance to the World Economic System. London: Zed Books. Patomäki, Heikki and Teivo Teivainen (2005) A Possible World: Democratic Transformation of Global Institutions. London: Zed Books. Santos, Boaventura de Sousa (2005) O Forum Social Mundial: Manual de Uso. São Paulo: Cortez/Porto: Afrontamento. Sen, Jai, Anita Anand, Arturo Escobar and Peter Waterman (eds) (2004) World Social Forum: Challenging Empires. New Delhi: The Viveka Foundation.

Global Assemblages

Biennials – periodic, independent and international exhibitions surveying trends in visual art – have with startling speed become key nodes in linking production, distribution and consumption of contemporary art. Cultural production and consumption have been typically separated in research, neglecting phenomena, like biennials, sitting in between. Biennials have become, however, key sites of both the production of art’s discourse and where that discourse translates into practices of display and contexts of appreciation. They are, this article argues, key sites of art’s symbolic production. Symbolic production is what makes a work, an artist, or even a genre visible and relevant, providing its sense in a system of classifications and, in an exhibition like a biennial, literally giving it a place in the scene. This article proposes a cultural analysis of biennials, focusing on the Venice Biennale, founded in 1895 and the first of the genre, through which we can trace biennials’ rise and transformations.

Monica Sassatelli

Theory, Culture & Society

Symbolic Production in the Art Biennial: Making Worlds

This article develops a diagnostic lens to make sense of the still baffling development of a ‘humanitarian marketplace’. Ambivalently hybrid initiatives such as volunteer tourism, corporate social responsibility or even fair trade do not strictly obey a distributive logic of market exchange, social reciprocity or philanthropic giving. They engender a type of ‘economy’ that must be apprehended in its own terms. The article argues that the large-scale collaborative effects of such a dispersed market can be theorized without resorting to the classical biopolitical move of simplified agency/holistic reification. The argument proceeds counterintuitively, by appropriating the notion of symbiosis as redefined by contemporary biology, contending through historical contextualization and conceptual work that nature itself offers the best example to grasp spontaneous collaboration among unrelated human beings as a non-automatically balanced and intrinsically political affair that calls for critical management through an ex post facto interventionist policy of selective cultivation.

Carlos Palacios

Symbiosis and the Humanitarian Marketplace: The Changing Political Economy of ‘Mutual Benefit’

I TO REVIEW a book by Paul Ricoeur is not just a daunting task, a highly risky adventure, but it is rather an impossible endeavor.1 For, how can one review an author whose work is made out of reviews of others, the style, rigor and criticism of which make the original, it’s often said, read better in his review? Therefore instead of a review, I will discuss some central themes of the relatively recent book (or rather three books in one) by Ricoeur entitled: La Mémoire, l’Histoire, l’Oubli.2 The book has three major and distinct parts, and each tackles a specific problematic. The first is entitled ‘Of Memory and Reminiscence’, the second ‘History/Epistemology’ and the third ‘The Historical Condition’. Each will be discussed in a separate section. In the introduction, Ricoeur states that the goal of his enterprise is not just a professional one – to engage on these issues with historians – it is also one of his ‘civic themes’. He writes:

Abdelmajid Hannoum

Paul Ricoeur On Memory

This special section on the later work of Paul Ricoeur is an attempt to examine the fruitfulness of that work for the social sciences. Of particular interest are his theorization and application of the notions of memory, identity, justice, and the relation to the other to political and ethical problems in the present. For example, his discourse links up the question of memory with that of justice and the problem of constructing new polities which can be considered just. To do this, he introduces the concepts of ‘translation ethos’, the ‘exchange of memories’ and ‘non-forgetful forgiveness’ in order to examine the problem of the conditions for the imaginary construction of political entities in which dialogue can take place between interlocutors with different, maybe conflicting, interests and historical locations, and thus with different senses of belonging and identities. His philosophical apparatus is shown to have particular salience for the analysis of contemporary society.

Steve Hedley Clark

Introduction: Paul Ricoeur: Memory, Identity, Ethics

This article shows how, in recent works of cultural analysis, the concept of ‘assemblage’ has been been derived from key sources of theory and put to work to provide a structure-like surrogate to express certain prominent values of a modernist sensibility in the discourse of description and analysis. Assemblage is a sort of anti-structural concept that permits the researcher to speak of emergence, heterogeneity, the decentred and the ephemeral in nonetheless ordered social life. There are other related concepts, like collage, which have been used to give these values substance in research, but currently assemblage is enjoying a popularity perhaps because of the continuing fascination of the work of Deleuze and Guattari.

George E. Marcus

Erkan Saka

Assemblage

The car has become ubiquitous in late modern society and has become the leading object in the ordinary social relations of mobility. Despite its centrality to the culture and material form of modern societies, the relationship between the car and human beings has remained largely unexplored by sociology. This article argues that cars are combined with their drivers into an assemblage, the ‘driver-car’, which has become a form of social being that brings about distinctive social actions in modern society – driving, transporting, parking, consuming, polluting, killing, communicating and so on. To understand the nature of this assemblage a number of theoretical perspectives that describe the interaction and collaboration between human beings and complex objects are explored; the process of driving, ‘affordance’, actor-network theory, and the embodied relationship between driver and car. This theoretical account of the driver-car is intended as a preliminary to the empirical investigation of the place of the driver-car in modern societies.

Tim Dant

The Driver-car

Bruno Latour’s writings have been discussed at length. My article proposes a ‘version’ of his career that emphasizes the obsessive permanence of his questioning, by focusing on the mission he set himself. Without presuming an a priori coherence, the religious and military connotations of the word ‘mission’ express the strong determination to act and the notion of a calling, and also the indeterminate nature of the object sought as well as the means of achieving it. As William James used to write, the word ‘mission’ underlines the fact that very early on Latour wrote ‘for. . .’, not followed by an object complement: for something remaining undefined. His aim was neither to build a general theory, nor explain a specific field of activity, such as science, religion or politics, but to grasp things differently, in order to change ways of thinking and acting. And he did it.

Antoine Hennion

Theory Culture & Society

Bruno Latour, Pragmatism and Politics: A Researcher on a Mission

The relationship Bruno Latour had with Adam Lowe illustrates the close link between art and technique, and the problem of representation. Thanks to 3D digitisation and rematerialisation techniques of cultural objects, Adam reproduces all kinds of artworks at all scales with an unprecedented degree of precision. He does not do that in the customary sense today of producing an image of them. Breaking with the division between physical objects and the digital world, Lowe really produces them again, creating their material doubles in 3D, with their volume, their thickness, their grain. Latour was fascinated by Lowe’s project and its achievements, particularly in that they call into question the controversial problem raised by Walter Benjamin of the aura of works of art. The reverse was true, as this interview makes abundantly clear: Lowe has been captivated by the radical way in which Latour redefined modes of representation.

Jean-Michel Frodon

An Interview with Adam Lowe: To Re-produce Works of Art

In this interview, Vinciane Despret discusses the importance of Bruno Latour to her work. In particular, she addresses the questions of methodology. She examines why it is necessary to invent a new method for each new object we study and how we can become more attentive as scientists, especially those specialising in ethology, to the ways in which humans and non-humans are interested in each other. Finally, Despret considers how we can inherit from Bruno Latour’s work for our future thinking.

Stephen Muecke

Iwona Janicka

An Interview with Vinciane Despret: A Question Rarely Lives Up to Its Situation

‘I love philosophy’. With this confession, in the twilight of his life, Bruno Latour concluded a series of interviews he gave to the French television channel ARTE. This passion was reflected in original, fundamental questions that could only be answered after a long period of fieldwork. In this article, I – who worked alongside him on a daily basis in the 1980s and 1990s – describe the significance of this philosophical quest which led Latour to cross disciplinary boundaries, free himself from institutional constraints and overcome resistance. In this way, he has not only contributed to the revival of science and technology studies, but has also brought about a powerful revival in human sciences.

Michel Callon

Working with Bruno Latour on a Daily Basis

Through our three-way collaboration we sought to understand Gaia and its political implications from the bottom-up and from within. Here we introduce that view of Gaia and how the dialogue between a philosopher (Bruno), a scientist (Tim), and a historian and philosopher of science (Séb) turned into a research programme. This sets in context a previously unpublished piece by Latour: ‘There is nothing simple in a feedback loop – or why goal function is not the problem of Gaia’.

Timothy M. Lenton

Sébastien Dutreuil

Bruno Latour

Gaia as Seen from Within

This article focuses on Bruno Latour’s writing. Through a series of examples, it shows how he has always sought to match the form of his works to their content, in a quest for coherence uncommon in the social sciences. Beyond the diversity of his works, we can nevertheless identify one dominant feature: a very explicit concern for the reader, and the use of a variety of techniques to engage him or her in an experience that is as sensible as it is intellectual.

Madeleine Akrich

Bruno Latour, Writer

This article argues that the concept of translation is central to the work of Bruno Latour, starting before ANT, with the group working on the sociologie de la traduction at the École des Mines. As one of his translators, I reflect on the extension of his identity via translation, then on the idea of translation as ‘political labour’ across social discontinuities, including those in colonisation contexts where certain languages can become hegemonic. Finally, with Latour’s major project, the Inquiry into Modes of Existence, translation continues its descriptive task, but carries so much weight over the various modes of existence that it qualifies as a key philosophical concept of considerable analytic value.

Bruno Latour and Translation

This article traces a path through Bruno Latour’s reflections on politics to propose a constitutional reading, which makes ontological and normative lines of investigation intersect. It starts with a discussion of a central theme in Latour’s work, that of war and, more generally, opposition and conflicts, and connects it with questions of representation, delegation and decision-making. The preoccupation with land and territories found in Latour’s latest work is an invitation to extend his notion of constitution and turn it into a situated matter of critical inquiry. The paper builds on debates and controversies surrounding mineral resources to show the analytical and critical value of constitutional analysis, and the way it can illuminate the ontological and normative issues associated with contemporary problematizations of land and territories.

Brice Laurent

Latour and the Question of Politics: A Constitutional Reading

In his major work, An Inquiry into the Modes of Existence, Bruno Latour sets out to establish an anthropology of the Moderns based on the plurality of the modes of existence that make up their world. What about the beings of science, politics, art, religion, economics and so on? How do these beings relate to one another, and how do they constitute the specific forms of thought of the Moderns? Taking as its starting point one of the central notions of modern thought, namely the notion of matter, this article seeks to identify the way in which Latour shows its importance in the constitution of modern thought. It examines its topicality through the double prism of an ecological and decolonial approach that animates Latour’s work, and which this article proposes to revisit.

Didier Debaise

The Land of the Moderns: The Sense of Latour’s Pragmatism

Without shouting it from the rooftops, Latour never hid the fact that he was a Catholic. Taking advantage of their friendly closeness, Antoine Hennion takes the liberty of proposing various readings of the way in which this curious parishioner lived his faith, each more or less compatible with the others, and with no need to decide between them.

短名	Theory. Cult. Soc.
Journal Impact	2.77
国际分区	CULTURAL STUDIES(Q1)
期刊索引	SCI Q1中科院 2 区

ISSN	0263-2764, 1460-3616
h-index	129
国内分区	社会学(2区)社会学文化研究(1区)
Top期刊	是

涉及主题	哲学社会学政治学法学认识论计算机科学艺术历史政治心理学地理经济生物语言学美学考古物理
出版信息	出版商: SAGE Publications Ltd，出版周期: ，期刊类型: journal，开源期刊: 非开源
基本数据	创刊年份: 1982，原创研究文献占比: 95.92%，自引率:3.70%， Gold OA占比: 32.29%

Theory, Culture and Society

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