New Books in Critical Theory

Steven FieldingView on AmazonTo understand contemporary politics we must understand how it is represented in fiction. This is the main argument in A State of Play: British Politics on Screen, Stage and Page, from Anthony Trollope to The Thick of It (Bloomsbury Academic, 2014) a new book by Steven Fielding, Professor of Politics at the University of Nottingham. The book explores how British politics has been represented in fiction from the late Victorian era through to the present. The book identifies a fascinating set of core themes, including how the political class has been defended and attacked, how the idea of populism has developed over time, along with the changing role of women in British political fiction. A State of Play does not over-claim, stressing that although an understanding of fiction is essential to understanding politics, we still don't know the exact relationship between people's political participation and political fiction. However, it does make a convincing case that any understanding of the British political system will be insufficient without understanding how it has been imagined and depicted. Indeed, as later chapters show, the mode of depiction itself has become an important territory for explaining British political culture. The book contains a huge range of examples, from the more well known television series, such as Yes, Minister and The Thick of It, through to obscure and perhaps forgotten books such as The Mistress of Downing Street. Overall it will be of interest to academics and the public alike.

Beth DriscollView on AmazonIt is a cliche to suggest we are what we read, but it is also an important insight. In The New Literary Middlebrow: Readers and Tastemaking in the Twenty First Century (Palgrave-MacMillan, 2014), Beth Driscoll, from University of Melbourne, extends and critiques the work of Pierre Bourdieu to account for modern literary tastes and the literary field in which those tastes are embedded. The book attempts to explore and defend the idea of the middlebrow in literature. 'Middlebrow' is defined by eight characteristics, whereby it is middle class, it has reverence to elite cultures, and it is entrepreneurial, mediated, feminised, emotional, recreational and earnest. In the main it is situated within the tension between the aesthetic and the commercial. The book uses four case studies to explore how this tension, along with the idea of the middlebrow, plays out. In the first case study the role of Oprah Winfrey as a tastemaker and cultural intermediary is explored as part of an analysis of book clubs. The analysis shows how Oprah's book club was important in establishing markets for books as well as being a site for the struggle over what is, and what is not, legitimate taste. This legitimacy is tied to elements of the middlebrow aesthetic, which has earnestness and self improvement as an important component. This component is both the source of struggle with more elite elements of the literary field and a source of changing reading practices, for example in the way Harry Potter is used in schools. The final two case studies, of book prizes and literary festivals, add to the defence of the middlebrow as a vital form of aesthetic production and cultural consumption for both understanding the future of reading and the future of the market for literature in the era of social media.

Sam FriedmanView on AmazonWhat is funny? What makes you laugh? We think of laughter as being universal idea that applies to everyone, no matter their age, ethnicity, gender or social class. In Comedy and Distinction: The Cultural Currency of a 'Good' Sense of Humour (Routledge, 2014), Sam Friedman tries to overturn our assumptions about comedy. The book draws on the work of Pierre Bourdieu to show how comedy is deeply related to social position, both in terms of what sorts of comedy people watch and listen to and also in terms of their sense of humour. Comedy is the basis for a form of distinction, as social groups differentiate themselves from others by their tastes. This applies not only to the upper and working class groups in society, but has implications for socially mobile individuals too. Moreover, the book shows how the assumption of good taste in comedy, which is related to having omnivorous cultural interests, is often bound up with symbolic violence from high social status groups towards the rest of society. Alongside the book's detailed consideration of cultural consumption, the text offers an insight into both the history and the business of comedy, illustrating how the tastemakers of comedy scouting and criticism reinforce the social divisions found in comedy consumption. In exploring both the production and consumption of comedy Friedman develops the idea of cultural capital in comedy, a theoretical idea that will be useful for anyone thinking about the sociology of culture. For the more general reader the book shows how important comedy is to modern society, as opposed to those who would see it as a lowbrow cultural form. By the end of the text the reader will understand that comedy is no laughing matter.

View on Amazon[Cross-posted from New Books in Psychoanalysis] What can possibly be wrong with the process of understanding in psychoanalytic treatment?  Everything, according to Bruce Fink.  In Against Understanding. Volume 1: Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian Key (Routledge, 2014), he argues that since understanding is part of the Lacanian imaginary, it often leads to fixed assumptions and projections on the part of both analyst and analysand, inhibiting change, or the curative in psychoanalysis.  Many of us probably have heard ourselves and others say that understanding why we do something hurtful or destructive does not seem to stop us from doing it; again and again and again.  In the clinical vignettes, case studies, and theoretical papers compiled in this volume Fink suggests that rather than understanding, clinicians ought to strive to bring the unconscious to speech – to help analysands communicate knowledge once residing in the unconscious.  Such knowledge is generated not through narrative, insight, or meaning making but parapraxes, slurred speech, and mixed metaphors – the non-sense produced by the subject of the unconscious.  Speaking that which was previously unsymbolizable shakes the ego at its foundation and enables therapeutic change. A section of Against Understanding is devoted to interviews conducted with the author about his translations of Lacan and the work of translation generally. We touch on issues of translation in our interview as well, highlighting the creativity, pleasures, frustrations, and compromises involved in the process. Bruce Fink and I have only begun to explore his theoretical and clinical writings.  Please stay tuned for the next installment in a few months, when we will discuss volume 2 of this incisive and thought-provoking collection.

Randal MarlinView on Amazon[Cross-posted from New Books in Journalism] It's been 100 years since the start of the First World War, a conflict that cost millions of lives. In his recently revised book, Propaganda and the Ethics of Persuasion (2013), Randal Marlin writes that Britain pioneered propaganda techniques to sell that war that have been imitated ever since. He tells how the British spread a false story about Germans boiling the bodies of their dead soldiers in corpse factories. It was designed to paint Germany as a uncivilized, ghoulish nation that had to be fought. Marlin also tells how American propaganda during the First World War helped foster the modern public relations and advertising industries. Marlin, who studied with the French propaganda theorist Jacques Ellul, sees propaganda as a manipulative exercise of power and he argues that in order to defend ourselves against it, we need to recognize its methods and techniques. His revised second edition analyzes how the Bush administration used fear to persuade Americans to support the invasion of Iraq. The book traces the history of propaganda from ancient times to its present, post 9/11 forms Randal Marlin is a professor of philosophy at Carleton University in Ottawa.

Bonnie J. MannView on AmazonIn the aftermath of 9/11, the American political landscape and its discourses took a peculiar turn. America's national sovereignty-conceived as the expression of its indomitable masculinity-had been challenged. Its mythical invulnerability had been crushed. The response of the United States to these events was both disturbing and enlightening. It revealed the darker underbelly of the American mythos, and revealed the highly gendered nature of American politics. Making use of gender testimony and other widely-shared cultural phenomena that arose during the 'War on Terror', Bonnie J. Mann constructs a notion of gender as bound up with the political. Listen in to our discussion of Dr. Mann's new book Sovereign Masculinity: Gender Lessons from the War on Terror (Oxford University Press, 2014).

Marisol SandovalView on AmazonWhat would a truly 'social' social media look like? This is the core question of From Corporate to Social Media: Critical Perspectives on Corporate Social Responsibility in Media and Communication Industries (Routledge, 2014),  the new book by Marisol Sandoval. The text is concerned with the emergence of a seemingly open and democratic space, social media, which is in fact subject to corporate dominance and control. The book aims to provide a political economy of the social relations in which media and communications industries are embedded, to reveal the inequalities of both power and control in social media. This point is illustrated through case studies of major corporations. Sandoval takes an important theme- including net neutrality, e-waste, ideologies, and labour conditions- and compares and contrasts CSR statements and positions with the reality of corporate actions on these themes. Case studies include Google, Apple, Disney and AT&T. The book concludes by considering how social media might become more social by thinking about how it might contribute to the idea of the commons, a concept that has been crucial to much critical theory thinking in recent years. By linking ideas of the commons to the political economy of media and communications, From Corporate to Social Media, gives an important new basis for future theoretical discussion. The book is therefore essential reading for all of us participating in the new world of social media, whether as academics, employees or as citizens.

Kathrin YacavoneView on Amazon[Cross-posted from New Books in French Studies] Kathrin Yacavone's Benjamin, Barthes, and the Singularity of Photography (Bloomsbury, 2014) is an engaging study that explores connections between two of the most significant thinkers of the twentieth century: Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) and Roland Barthes (1915-1980). Considering Benjamin's influence on Barthes' later work on photography, the book also opens up the possibility of thinking of Barthes' influence on how we think about and understand Benjamin in terms of the medium's effects and significance in theoretical terms. Divided into two parts, the book situates Benjamin and Barthes in their respective historical and political contexts while pursuing a series of themes through their work on photography: self and other, autobiography, memory, and redemption. It also looks closely at each author's readings of particular photographs, and even establishes links between these. An intriguing postscript explores the continuing relevance of the ideas of these thinkers into the age of digitization. Listeners will find much in our conversation that illuminates the history and theory of photography, as well as the ideas and oeuvres of both Benjamin and Barthes more broadly. In our interview, Kathrin and I speak about the book and also about her recent work editing a Summer 2014 issue of Nottingham French Studies on "Photography in Contemporary French and Francophone Cultures". Outlining the themes of the articles included in this recent collection, Kathrin offers some thoughts on the continuing vitality of the medium in present-day France.

View on AmazonWhat is waste? William Viney's Waste: A Philosophy of Things (Bloomsbury, 2014) explores the meaning of waste across a variety of contexts, including literature, sculpture and architecture. The text begins by stressing the importance of time to our understanding of waste, as opposed to more traditional conceptions that are grounded in spatial distinctions. Rather than looking at waste through the dualities of useful or not useful, dirty or clean, William Viney asks us to be attentive to our relationship to objects in time, understanding how they are understood by the many narratives that they may contain, which they may have been party to, and which they may require for us to be able to understand them. The book draws on an emerging but established tradition of work that draws attention to the role of materiality and objects in our understanding of the world. By offering an alternative to the view that waste is the garbage of consumer capitalism, we can see the value of things as their potential, as it is realised in time. The importance of time to understanding objects, as well as understanding waste, is seen through diverse examples, from Cornelia Parker's sculptures, one created from an exploded shed, through the material objects of the manuscripts of James Joyce, to the representation of future ruins in The Planet of The Apes. These diverse and eclectic sites to exploring waste sit alongside the readings of more traditional subjects for literary theory, such as Elliot's The Waste Land, meaning the book will appeal to a range of scholars working across the humanities and in the social sciences.

Mari RutiView on Amazon[Cross-posted from New Books in Psychoanalysis] Exploring everything from the impact of her own psychoanalysis on her mode and mien to the effect of consumer culture on the psyche, the delightful Mari Ruti keeps the ball rolling.  We pondered with her so many things that the interview feels like xmas morning! Traversing the advent of self-help books, Lacan, the Frankfurt School, the super ego, the repetition compulsion, hegemony, trauma, love and more, there is seemingly no topic germane to psychoanalysis and daily life that Ruti shies away from. In The Call of Character: Living a Life Worth Living (Columbia University Press, 2013)–a book akin in spirit to McDougall's Plea for a Measure of Abnormality albeit without the case studies–Ruti argues that a bit of madness is an agreeable thing. Loving one's symptom lessens its impact for sure. As such, Ruti embraces Lacan rather fully as she argues for the ways in which desire can produce forms of human subjectivity that don't reproduce the normative. By helping us to identify what lures us away from listening more carefully to the "call" of our own "characters", Ruti plots a course to live a life worth living.

Karl SpracklenView on AmazonOur taken for granted assumptions are questioned in a new book by Karl Spracklen, a professor of leisure studies at Leeds Metropolitan University in England. Whiteness and Leisure (Palgrave, 2013) combines two bodies of theoretical literature to interrogate leisure activities which seem innocuous or inoffensive. The book deploys insights from critical race theory along with the work of Jurgen Habermas to at once critique leisure as a site for the continued reproduction of inequality, but at the same time consider the utopian or transformative possibilities offered by leisure activity. The central inequality concerning Whiteness and Leisure is that of the socially constructed, but socially powerful, idea of race. Spracklen argues that whilst there is no scientific evidence for the vast swathes of claims made about race, the idea is influential in modern life. Most notably, ideas of race create categories of normal or taken for granted, in the case of whiteness, and other, exotic and different in the case of blackness. The replication of social inequality using categories of race is shown in discussions of sport, both participating and watching, of popular culture, such as Harry Potter  and World of Warcraft, Music, including Folk and Metal, and forms of travel, tourism and outdoor experience. Drawing on a wide range of literature, empirical examples and personal anecdotes, the text will be of interest to readers from across both social science and the humanities, as well as anyone concerned with social justice.

John ProteviView on Amazon[Cross-posted from New Books in Science, Technology, and Society] Right now, humanists across very different disciplinary fields are trying to create the kinds of cross-disciplinary conversations that might open up new ways to conceptualize and ask questions of our objects of study. John Protevi's new book offers a wonderfully stimulating conceptual toolbox for doing just that. Life, War, Earth: Deleuze and the Sciences (University of Minnesota Press, 2013) creates (and guides readers through) a dialogue between the work of Gilles Deleuze and some key works and concepts animating contemporary geophilosophy, cognitive science, and biology. In doing so, Protevi's work also has the potential to inform work in STS by turning our attention to new possibilities of thinking with scale, and with a process-oriented philosophy (among many other things). A first introduction lays out some of the basic conceptual tools and orientations emerging from Deleuze's work, and a second introduction uses some of these ideas to explore the work of Francisco Varela in terms of a political physiology of "bodies politic." After this pair of introductions, the following chapters focus on particular case studies, ranging from ancient and modern warfare, to hydropolitics, to the notion of a "socially mediated neuroplasticity" in cognitive science, to the role of affect in understanding the Occupy Wall Street movement, to the "eco-devo-evo" of Mary Jane West-Eberhard, and much, much else. It's a fascinating study that has much to offer for the reader who is interested in the creative and analytic possibilities of bringing continental philosophy to bear in science studies.

Helene SneeView on AmazonHelene Snee, a researcher at the University of Manchester, has written an excellent new book that should be essential reading for anyone interested in the modern world. The book uses the example of the 'gap year', an important moment in young people's lives, to deconstruct issues of class, cosmopolitanism and identity. Like many other aspects of contemporary life, common assumptions about travel (as opposed to tourism) or the individual experience (as opposed to patterns in social life) are taken apart in the book. The book reflects broader debates around class in British society that have been influenced by French theorist Pierre Bourdieu, such as the recent Great British Class Survey. The book situates itself in the tradition that seeks to unsettle the assumptions about taken for granted ideas about what is good judgement or good taste, asking why one form of, largely, middle class self development is privileged over others. A Cosmopolitan Journey? Difference, Distinction and Identity Work in Gap Year Travel (Ashgate, 2014) is not just a contribution to critical theory. In order to understand the lives of the gap year individuals, Snee uses online blogs as evidence for the way that the 'gappers' tell stories that are about the places they have come from (rather than travelled to), about having 'authentic' (& potentially middle class) experiences during their travels and about being self-developing individuals. Crucially the book shows how even the word 'travelling' draws boundaries with 'tourism' to show how power and class dominance function to make it seem as if 'not everyone has the good taste to take a gap year', rather than the choice of a gap year being part of a much broader social structure. Snee's combination of travel and tourism as a topic, using predominantly young people's experiences as an example, along with the way the text speaks directly to sociological debates between thinkers such as Bourdieu and Giddens, mark A Cosmopolitan Journey out as essential reading for a very wide audience.

William E. ConnollyView on Amazon[Cross-posted from New Books in Science, Technology, and Society] Bill Connolly's new book proposes a way to think about the world as a gathering of self-organizing systems or ecologies, and from there explores the ramifications and possibilities of this notion for how we think about and practice work with markets, politics, daily life, and beyond. The Fragility of Things: Self-Organizing Processes, Neoliberal Fantasies, and Democratic Activism (Duke UP, 2013) opens with a prelude that takes readers into the 1755 earthquake disaster in Lisbon via Voltaire's Candide, using this to introduce a critique of neoliberalism that will continue to be so important for the duration of the book. Connolly reframes our understanding of markets in terms of an entanglement of human and nonhuman systems, with main chapters successively offering a critique of current thinking about neoliberalism and clear suggestions for how to move forward from it, a close reading of the work of Friedrich Hayek, and wonderfully productive dialogues between Kant and Hesiod (in Ch. 3) and Nietzsche and Whitehead (in Ch. 4). A series of interludes open up the narrative and ideas from the main chapters in light of contemporary film, bridges and thermodynamic systems, and the idea of human "fullness" and vitality. A postlude explores the relations between belief, sensibility, role experimentation, and political activism. In short, The Fragility of Things is an inspiring and beautifully written work. For readers interested in STS in particular, it also offers a way to think with self-organizing systems in the service of reorienting our stories about (human and nonhuman) individuals, their relationships, and the larger networks of which they're a part. Highly recommended!

David HesmondhalghView on AmazonWhat is the value of music and why does it matter? These are the core questions in David Hesmondhalgh's new book Why Music Matters (Wiley Blackwell, 2014). The book attempts a critical defence of music in the face of both uncritical populist post-modernism and more economistic neo-liberal understandings of music's worth. Hesmondhalgh develops this critical defence of music by exploring its importance to individuals, to places, to communities and to nations, eventually engaging with the global aspects of music's role and position in society. The book seeks to argue against some common positions in music, reasserting the importance of embodied experiences, such as dancing, whilst taking issue with the idea of the rock star as hero. Moreover Hesmondhalgh shows the social position and social structures surrounding music, whilst remaining attentive to the aesthetic qualities of both genres and individual pieces of music. Most notably the book is ambivalent about much of the promises claimed by the advocates of music's transformative potential, but is never bleak, retaining a refreshing realism about the capacity of music to matter to people, publics and nations across the world.