Social & Political Thought

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Open Access
Thinking the End in Itself: a Critical Study of First Principles in Plato, Aristotle, the Bible, and Kant
(2014-07-09) Khimji, Mohamed; Polka, Brayton
What is truth? What is untruth? Or is there no truth or untruth? Is the mind trapped, as Hume concludes, between false reason and no reason? In my dissertation I show that Hume’s conclusion is inevitable only when we reduce moral reason, founded on the biblical ideal of love, to the law of contradiction and sense perception, the twin engines of ancient Greek teleology. To defend the above, I argue that there is no consciousness of either truth or untruth in ancient Greek thought. That is why its two greatest expositors, Plato and Aristotle, teach that human beings are ignorant of the end in itself, the highest good (or telos) that all men seek. For the end is, in itself, not relative (related) to consciousness which is not (the) good but to appearance only. The ancient Greeks, I show, have no alternative but to employ deductive logic and inductive logic as the indemonstrable bases of demonstration. This leads them into inescapable contradictions. Kant demonstrates that sense perception and logic are each worthless unless they serve moral ends. This insight, he shows, is biblical. “Christianity” reveals that the truth cannot be thought except as existing and cannot exist except in thought. For the “categorical imperative” to love your neighbor (the stranger, your friend, your enemy …) as yourself by treating her as you would want her to treat you, i.e., always as an end and never as a means, is a priori. This means, Kant sees, that there is no possibility even of thinking of anything that is absolutely good, in the world or out of it, except a good will. In the dissertation that follows I distinguish between two incommensurable ontologies: the ancient Greek, in which human beings are ignorant of the end in itself, and the biblical, in which the moral will is the end in itself. I show that to conflate these standpoints is to conflate reason with logic and sense, bad will (evil) with ignorance, and, in so doing, to create the contradictions that necessarily follow whenever we seek the truth in things that we cannot will.
Open Access
Non-Aligned Modernism: Yugoslavian Art and Culture from 1945-1990
(2014-07-09) Videkanic, Bojana; Hill, Richard
This thesis seeks to understand and recover contemporary social, political and aesthetic value from the often dismissed or marginalized history of Yugoslavian modernism. The significance and complexity of the Yugoslavian experiment with modernism has often passed unrecognized. It has been dismissed as derivative and marginal or else eclipsed and tainted by the collapse of the Yugoslavian state in the early 1990s. To understand Yugoslavian modernism’s particularity we must recognize that socialist Yugoslavia existed as an in-between political power that negotiated the extremes of the Cold War by building a version of socialism independent from the Soviet model. Its art and culture were equally idiosyncratic. Although Yugoslavian cultural and political elites accepted modernism as a national cultural expression, the way that modernism developed did not strictly follow Western models. As a mixture of various aesthetic, philosophical, and political notions, Yugoslavian modernism can only be described by a political term associated with the international movement that Yugoslavia participated in at the time: Non-Aligned. I make a parallel between Yugoslavia’s political ambitions to build a country outside of the two Blocs and its rising modernist culture meant to reflect ideas of Non-Alignment, self-managing socialism, and nation-building. Yugoslavian Non-Aligned modernism also had strong anti-imperialist characteristics influenced by the country’s colonial and semi-colonial status vis-à-vis Western Europe. Modernist influences were therefore refracted and changed as they penetrated the Yugoslavian cultural milieu. Artistic and intellectual groups, exhibitions, and political ideas discussed in this thesis show a tendency to oscillate between revolutionary socialist ideas, and more conservative aesthetic and political attitudes. But it is precisely this curious mixture of aesthetic utopianism and aesthetic and political pragmatism that make Yugoslavian modernism interesting and valuable to reconsider now. Instead of reading Yugoslavian modernism as derivate of predominantly Western forms, we should read it as a form of alternative modernism that developed its complexities not only because of the Western colonial and imperial cultural project, of which Yugoslavia was a part of, but in spite of it. Non-Aligned modernism is therefore both a critique and a continuation of the modernist project and as such deepens our understanding of modernism and its struggle to actualize its progressive ideals.
Open Access
Contemporary Ruins: Politics and Aesthetics Beyond the Melancholy Imagination
(2014-07-09) Henderson, Christine Rose; Forsyth, James Scott
This thesis attempts to elucidate the specificities of contemporary ruins using critical theory and cultural studies applied to various sites of analysis ranging from art and film to abandoned factories and disaster zones. It is motivated not only by the question of whether thinking about the contemporary world through the conceptual paradigm of the ruin might offer insight into the crises that afflict our everyday lives, but by the political desire to seek, amidst the ruins, an opportunity to re-imagine the possible.The ruinous processes of creative destruction, dispossession, commodification, forced obsolescence, deindustrialization and disaster are examined in their relation to the workings of capitalism. Capitalism is seen to systematically manufacture ruins, producing physical, ecological and affective geographies of ruination. These ruins are the starting point to ask the question: What does it mean for the political imagination to be confronted with social reality as a mounting pile of wreckage? I suggest that it has a profound impact upon our sense of historical agency, upon our capacity to dream, to imagine, and to act. Ruins are bound up with losses of all kinds, and, as such, with larger cultural practices of memory and mourning. While ruins in capitalist modernity still embodied a dialectic tension between old and new, loss and invention, nostalgia and optimism, ruins in postmodernity lack the same productive tension: they seem to signal unqualified loss and the foreclosure of all possibilities for the future. I argue that moving beyond this depressive melancholy imagination, one of the many 'ruins of modernity', requires that we confront and work through these losses in order to be better able to seize the opportunities for resistance and social change that exist in the present. The representation of ruins, the relation of form to content, is considered from the standpoint of its ability to restore perceptibility and responsiveness or, inversely, to anaesthetize and make us numb. Radical, self-reflexive aesthetic practices, concerned with symbolizing loss and deepening historical awareness, are presented as a creative and promising approach to re-appropriating the ruins.
Open Access
At the Intersection of Ethics and Aesthetics: Emmanuel Levinas and Theodor Adorno on the Work of Art
(2015-01-26) Belmer, Stephanie Lynn; Horowitz, Asher
This dissertation undertakes a comparative study of the aesthetic theory of Theodor Adorno and the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. I argue that Levinas’s resistance to aesthetics and Adorno’s to ethics have led interpreters to miss an essential overlap in their writings. My first concern is to demonstrate that Adorno’s theory of aesthetics, when placed side by side with Levinas's philosophy, serves to expand Levinas’s conception of the ethical encounter. While Levinas provides a rich account of the ethical, he does not commit himself in any serious way to the study of aesthetics. The expression unique to ethics, for Levinas, occurs as a face-to-face encounter, and Levinas is quite emphatic that the ethical encounter is not produced by any work, including and especially the work of art. Nonetheless, Levinas finds in certain artists evidence of ethical expression. When read alongside Adorno's aesthetic theory, it becomes possible to argue that Levinas’s ethics of responsibility need not be limited to the relation between two human beings. The experience of ethics described by Levinas can then be extended to include the experience of works of art. My second concern is to demonstrate how Levinas’s notion of ethical transcendence challenges Adorno's perceived confinement within a system of immanent critique. Adorno, like Levinas, criticizes a form of rationality that would elevate the subject to an absolute; and Adorno, again like Levinas, seeks ways to interrupt this subject’s totalizing stance. However, Adorno refuses to outline an ethics and there is much to his writing, particularly his reliance on a negative dialectics, which makes it very difficult to imagine ethics in the way that Levinas describes. Nonetheless, I argue that the two thinkers are not as far apart as they at first seem. There are striking similarities between Adorno's account of the artwork’s disorienting effect on subjectivity and Levinas’s description of the effect of alterity on the subject. By exposing these similarities, it becomes possible to attribute a Levinasian ethical dimension to Adornian aesthetic experience. In other words, Levinas helps us to push Adorno beyond his reliance on a privative description of ethics and thus allows for a productive rereading of Adorno's theory of art as critique.
Open Access
Radical Vernaculars: Experiments with Tradition between Politics and Performance
(2015-08-28) Levine, Gabriel Jamie; Boon, Marcus B.
This dissertation focuses on four collective projects that take “tradition” as a starting point for creative experiments in performance practice. All of these disparate projects are based in early 21st-century settler-colonial North America, and all of them have anachronistic, political, and playful qualities. Following a theoretical and methodological Introduction, the dissertation moves through close readings of four experiments with “traditional” practices. Chapter One looks at the Purim Extravaganza, a diasporic and queer version of the carnivalesque Jewish festival that takes place each year in New York City. Chapter Two addresses the mobile audiovisual performances of Ottawa DJ collective A Tribe Called Red, exploring Indigenous experiments with technology and tradition. Chapter Three gives an account of the Abandoned Practices Institute, a summer school in performance pedagogy based on forgotten or endangered everyday practices, run by former members of the performance collective Goat Island. Chapter Four investigates the North American revival of culinary fermentation practices, spurred in part by the writings of Sandor Katz, in order to examine the contradictions of vernacular revivals at the level of daily life. All of these collective experiments offer insight into the fate of “tradition” as that which is abandoned (and then recuperated in frozen form) during the modernizing process, especially in settler-colonial societies. By reactivating vernacular material that has been consigned to an unchanging past, these experimental projects work through complex histories of colonization, shame, and abandonment, moving toward a space of shared capacity and collective action. Drawing on both participatory and critical research, the thesis examines various performance strategies that experiment with vernacular forms across gaps in historical and cultural continuity. In so doing, it engages with key issues in contemporary political and aesthetic thought: temporality, community, coloniality, property, and collective practice.
Open Access
Mere Sources of Error: Workers, Patients, and the Reductive Logic of Rationalized Healthcare
(2015-08-28) Norys, Marnina Margaret Ann; Antze, Paul G.
This project represents a sustained critique of the reductive logic of rationalized healthcare delivery systems which reduces the individuality of both workers and patients to little more than problems for the system itself. Drawing on social theory and ethnographic data, I show that wherever clients’ needs or the caregiver’s empathic responses to those needs threaten the efficient working of the system, both are taken as aberrant, as “mere sources of error”. In contrast to this systemic dismissal of workers’ empathic responses to the personal needs of patients, I consider the basis in moral philosophy for the view that workers’ caring impulses ground morality writ large and are essential in the provision of humane care. Hence, I argue, such feelings should be carefully heeded and cultivated rather than ignored and controlled. I also argue – in distinct opposition to modern managerial logic – that there are strong grounds, both moral and managerial, for less systemic control over caregivers’ time and practices. A reduction in central control is important not only because adequate care is time-consuming, but because unstructured time and space are necessary for the development of the sort of caring attitude that is essential for humane caregiving practices. Time and space are also key for the cultivation of phronēsis, a form of wisdom that enables one to discern when a system, not a person, has gone wrong, and when efficiency must be sacrificed in the name of humanity. While such reflections apply to healthcare delivery systems generally speaking, the development of morally wise and caring workers is especially crucial for work done with persons suffering from severe and persistent mental illness (SPMI). Because such persons have been thoroughly marginalized in society, drawing them back into a community of care is essential to meeting their needs. Based on my own ethnographic observations, I contend that the ethos of Assertive Community Treatment (ACT) represents a refreshing departure from the rationalized treatment modalities that prevail in modern psychiatric facilities. The program, however, is becoming increasingly rationalized as it enters the mainstream, bringing pressure for more detailed management of workers’ activities. The encroachments that are likely to follow from this intensification of management may well erode some of the most morally valuable aspects of ACT work.
Open Access
Stillborn: The Libidinal Economy of Gadgetized Mediation in the Era of Socialization for Consumption; An Explanatory Political Project
(2015-08-28) Selimovic, Adnan; Bell, Shannon M.
This project captures an attempt to politicize one aspect of Western middle class youth’s everyday experience growing up and living in postindustrial consumer society—the replacement of experiential, material, and libidinal gratification with that of ideological satisfaction. The dissertation takes up problematic adolescent gaming as a site to interrogate the ways and means of technologically-backed consumer socialization, and draw out the implications for subject-formation and possibility of self-determination. Developing new ways to conceptualize politics of youth, the project re-reads existing academic research on youth and gaming. Its main goal is to create a theoretical framework that can sustain an understanding of the importance of consumerizing gadget-mediated self-self cultivation across the dimensions of political economy and its strict materiality, psycho-sociality and its relational concreteness, and the realm of the mind in which ideology meets consciousness. Under the guise of critiquing the banality of gaming studies, the project excavates ideas from various critical theory, phenomenological and psychoanalytic traditions to raise political questions of social reproduction and clarify a concretely political path beyond the present circumstances. I am interested in exploring how it is that generation after generation young people born in the compromised consumption-rendered centers of global capital do not revolt against the seemingly repressive institutions shaping their lives. In this question, there is an intergenerational politics, a politics in which the question of youth and their otherness is crashed into the structuration of political economy and social reproduction within it. This is ultimately the theme of my inquiry. The present work is a study of gaming as a site where we should expect to see the manifestations of this kind of intersection, but instead what we see is a single-minded preference for celebrating the gaming industry and securing the ideologically soothing reproduction. I want to address the politics signaled by the changing role of play in advanced consumer economy, where in the site of gaming, through controlled bursts of traumatization and regularization, prediction of subjective experience is commodified into the global capitalistic circuits.
Open Access
Eurocentric Archival Knowledge Production and Decolonizing Archival Theory
(2015-08-28) Gordon, Aaron Andrew; Abdel-Shehid, Gamal
This dissertation is interested in how archival theory—the theoretical work of archiving produced by archivists and, to a lesser extent, the modes of doing archival research deployed by researchers—tackles the colonial roots and routes of archives, archivists and archival theories and practices. At the base of this examination of archival theory is the assumption that theory produces the object it evaluates. Thus, as opposed to interrogating a pre-existing archive, archival theory produces imaginative and material archival spaces in which archivists and researchers labour. In this dissertation, then, I examine the ways in which Eurocentric intellectual frameworks continue to frame archival theory and, thus, delimit how archivists and researchers produce knowledge about and through archives. In particular, this dissertation is interested in how the Eurocentrism underwriting archival theory as much shapes archivists’ understanding of colonialism and colonial archives by establishing the archive’s and archival theory’s geography, history and future trajectory as covers over the archives’ and archival theory’s colonial history. With an eye to the work of contemporary archivists and theorists who critically interrogate the ways archives and archivists reproduce unequal social relations of power, the following chapters negotiate the tension within these critiques between developing more democratic, socially just and postcolonial archives and archival theory, and the Eurocentric intellectual frameworks that reiterate the divisions between West and non-West, modern societies and traditional communities, literate and oral, and between reason and feeling. The works of Canadian archivists and scholars figure prominently in my dissertation as they both shape my analyses of the effects of Eurocentrism and continuing settler colonial relations on archives, archiving and archival research, and also become objects of analysis through which I trace out the discourses that work to secure and trouble settler title and entitlement to Aboriginal land by erasing or nullifying Indigenous sovereignty in and through Canada’s archives. The aim of my dissertation is to propose modes of archival knowledge production that trouble, if not displace, these Eurocentric and settler frameworks to decolonize archives and archival theory.
Open Access
The Atlantic Roots of Working-Class Internationalism: A Historical Re-Interpretation
(2015-08-28) Drapeau, Thierry; McNally, David J.
This dissertation offers a historical re-interpretation of working-class internationalism by situating its development within the early modern Atlantic-world economy (c. 1600-1830). Through an exploration of various moments of insurgency and revolt of an emerging Atlantic class of workers, among them slaves, sailors, servants, and others, it demonstrates that profound and decisive traditions of proletarian solidarity across borders existed prior to the nineteenth-century classical age of working-class internationalism. In doing so, this dissertation alters the prevailing standpoint of the free, white, waged, industrial worker of Europe by bringing in that narrative the agency of the unfree, black (and racialized), wageless, plantation-slave worker of the Americas. Underpinning this intervention is a more generous and complex understanding of capitalism as a mode of production inclusive of unfree forms of labour. In order to recover and foreground early formative moments of working-class internationalism in the Atlantic-world economy, this dissertation proposes to re-theorize this development in terms of processes of transboundary proletarian solidarity in a longue durée frame. Rooted in a multidisciplinary framework of analysis situated at the intersection of Historical Sociology, Global Labour History, Atlantic Studies, and Social History, this strategy has allowed me to illuminate two world-significant moments of proletarian solidarity played out across colonial and imperial borders. The first is golden age piracy (1714-26), when thousands of insurgent seafaring workers of all nationalities revolted against capitalist exploitation at sea and took possession of their ships, instituting their own self-governments and creating multicrew alliances against imperial navies. The second moment expressing a durable process of transboundary proletarian solidarity is offered by the Saint-Domingue revolution (1791-1804), when thousands of African slaves rose up to overthrow slavery, leading to the formation of the first independent black republic in the Americas. This dissertation highlights that during the revolution, underground channels of communication entertained by black sailors and corsairs linked revolutionary Saint-Domingue to other slave revolts elsewhere in the Atlantic world, which cumulated in, and intersected with, the wake of working-class internationalism during the 1848 revolutions in Europe.
Open Access
The Neoliberal Biopolitics of Disability: Towards Emergent Intracorporeal Practices
(2015-12-16) Fritsch, Kelly Michelle; Martin, Aryn
In this dissertation I link the contemporary biopolitical production of disability to the neoliberalization of social, political, and economic practices, policies, and discourses that capacitate some disabled bodies while leaving others to wither. While ableism insidiously functions to exclude and marginalize individuals through rendering disabled bodies as abnormal, I argue that neoliberal capacitation does not always function to normalize disabled subjects. Instead, neoliberal modes of capacitation and debilitation work alongside and also cross ableist categories to include enhanced and capacitated abled-disabled bodies and subjects. As opposed to producing clear-cut lines by which to demarcate disability and disabled bodies, the relationship between capacitating and debilitating and ableism shift and slide in relation to each other. I further explore the ways in which practices of neoliberalization economize all aspects of life and disability relations. I find that disability emerges through the neoliberalization of disability relations as an individual object and problem to be solved, whether by way of the future-oriented promises and enhancements of biocapitalist technoscience, through processes of self-care, or through the good feelings of inclusion. Neoliberalization does not just simply construct barriers and reproduce forms of ableist oppression for disabled people, but also informs the solutions proposed by disabled communities to these barriers. Mapping out the power relations of the neoliberal material-discursive practices surrounding disability moves us away from positioning disability solely as a problem of exclusion to interrogating how worthiness as the basis of inclusion itself is produced within neoliberal biocapitalism. To move away from a neoliberal approach that includes only worthy disabled persons while also disrupting other ableist representations of disability requires going beyond including more disabled people within the exploitative and individualized relations of neoliberalism. To that end, I mark disability as an intracorporeal emergence of the world whereby the relations of disability extend beyond the human and are contingently practiced, emphasizing a relational approach that decentres the economized disabled subject.
Open Access
Colonial Theology: John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Charles Darwin and the Emergence of the Colonial-Capitalist World System, 1500-1900
(2016-09-20) Kolia, Zahir Yasser; Abdel-Shehid, Gamal
My dissertation examines the relationship between the theological political and temporality in the constitution of the colonial-capitalist world system from the fifteenth century to the nineteenth century. World systems and postcolonial approaches to colonial expansion have often reduced questions of theology to a discursive feature of producing difference through the binary frame of self/other in order to justify a will to power, territory, and capital accumulation. My dissertation argues that the theocentric epistemic tradition of commensurability and resemblances structured by theological temporal formations have played a large role in colonial expansion, and can be better understood by applying the decolonial concept of coloniality to illustrate how theology, political economy and philosophy form plural points of enunciation for the constitution of the colonial-capitalist world system. What is distinctive about this project is that I bring together world systems theory, postcolonial theory and theological political perspectives under a decolonial approach in order to highlight the importance of epistemology in the establishment of a global hierarchical system that produces and locates Western knowledge, cosmology and spirituality over non-Western forms. This dissertation, therefore, outlines a methodological trajectory that does not instrumentalize the theological to a materialist rendition of capitalist accumulation, colonial expansion and conquest. Rather, I will seek to characterize how capital, colonialism and theology were entwined, negotiated and expressed in often contradictory ways through the writings of John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Charles Darwin. In doing so, I examine the material inscriptions and historical particularity regarding the entangled secular and theological forms of reasoning, knowledge traditions, and temporalities that emerged in relation to the contingencies of coloniality.
Open Access
Decolonizing Literacies: Transnational Feminism, Legacies of Coloniality, and Pedagogies of Transformation
(2016-09-20) Ruddy, Karen Ann; Taylor, Patrick D M
Since the onset of the U.S.-led Global War on Terror (G.W.O.T.) and Afghan War in 2001, the literacy crisis of Afghan women has been central to the U.S.s counter-terrorism and counter-insurgency doctrines, and to its post-conflict reconstruction efforts in the country. While many aspects of the G.W.O.T. have been subject to critical scrutiny over the last decade, literacy remains curiously absent from such discussions. This silence is primarily due to the widely-accepted views that literacy is a necessary precondition for female empowerment, and that the extension of literacy education to Afghan girls and women is therefore one of the few undisputed successes of the Afghan war. Troubling this conventional wisdom, this dissertation employs an anti-racist transnational feminist framework to argue that the narratives of Afghan womens literacy crisis that have circulated within the Western imaginary since 9/11 are enmeshed in, and are forms of, the epistemic, semiotic, and political-economic violence that characterizes present-day practices of neo-liberal war and dispossession. They have been central to U.S. foreign policy discourse because they install a civilizational divide between the post-feminist, literate West where gender and sexual justice allegedly have been achieved and the racialized and gendered figures of the Afghan woman as an illiterate Third World woman in need of saving from dangerous Muslim men. As such, these narratives have served to legitimate not only the Afghan war, but also the modernization of Afghan women according to a Western neo-liberal agenda and the normalization of a particular image of Western gender and sexual exceptionalism that conceals continuing gender, sexual, colonial, racial, and class disparities at home. This study traces the disavowed and forgotten colonial legacies of this divide between the literate West and the illiterate Other to the colonization of the indigenous peoples of the Americas, the history of racialized slavery and anti-Black racism in the U.S., and the institutionalization of the literacy/orality divide in mid-twentieth century sociolinguistics and anthropology. Moreover, it explores how such legacies of coloniality are reproduced in the liberal feminist internationalism of Martha Nussbaums capabilities approach to international development which emphasizes female pain and suffering in the global south and some forms of third-wave international feminism which celebrate female empowerment and the pleasures of trans* and gender-variant subjects. Finally, this study contends that feminists committed to the liberatory potential of literacy must grapple with the promises and failures of anti-colonial (Paulo Freire) and postcolonial (Gayatri Spivak) theories of literacy in order to elaborate literacies of decolonization: ways of reading and writing the word and the world that challenge the epistemic domination of subaltern knowledges, while also elaborating alternative political imaginaries and pedagogies of hope and transformation that move beyond the necropolitics of the neo-liberal global order.
Open Access
To Hold the World Visible: Writing and History in the Work of Mohammed Dib
(2016-09-20) Adjemian, Baskerville Jonathan; Hadj-Moussa, Ratiba
This dissertation proposes a broad reading of the work of the Algerian francophone writer Mohammed Dib, some 30 volumes of novels, poetry, stories, and nonfiction writing published between 1952 and 2003. It reads a tension in Dib's work between the visible, the immediately given details of life and transmissible structure of meaning, and the invisible, larger structures or processes that link disparate elements without being themselves describable. Such a tension can be translated into the languages of Islamic mysticism, phenomenology, or a philosophy of history, all discourses that guide the investigation of Dib's work. The dissertation proposes that for Dib an acknowledgement of the invisible as an underlying unity connecting its various manifestations, a flux of experience not divisible into separate categories of object and subject, or a course of events exceeding the control and grasp of definable actors does not lead to escapism or rejection of reality, but to a return to the visible, to increased attention to the details of everyday life and the observable world. The act of writing, for Dib, involves holding to the world, even though the words that link writer and reader are only shadows of the events they witness or the processes that produce them. The dissertation's first half focuses on Dib's writing technique and influence, situating him in 20th-century French and francophone literary theory, tracing his adoption of Arab-Islamic, North African, and Sufi literary and aesthetic traditions, and analyzing how conscious experience forms and dissolves in his presentation of landscape and in childhood. The second half turns to his treatment of historical events, mainly those of Algeria through the colonial period, the war of independence, the post-independence period, and the civil war of the 1990s. Dib's commitment to the perspective of the marginalized, search for a way of presenting history that does not condemn the details of everyday life to insignificance, and attention to the role of imagination lead to criticism of colonial, bureaucratic, and apocalyptic attitudes as attempting to escape the given world, and searches for a use of history that undoes, rather than reinforces, physical and symbolic acts of exclusion.
Open Access
What's Love Got to Do With It? Diamonds and the Accumulation of De Beers, 1935-55
(2016-09-20) Cochrane, David Troy; Nitzan, Jonathan
What is accumulation? Visibly, accumulation is a quantitative process, demarcated in financial quantities. However, what is the meaning of those quantities? This question has been the subject of great debate within political economic thought. A new theory of accumulation, capital as power (CasP), argues that the financial quantities of accumulation express the distribution of power among the owners of capital over the qualitatively diverse, complex and mutating social order. With this dissertation, I explore the relationship between the quantities and qualities of accumulation by examining the De Beers diamond cartel, focusing on the period 1935-55. What does it mean to say capital is power in the specific setting of the global diamond assemblage? Research and analysis led me to focus on four important relationships that De Beers had to establish, maintain and transform in its struggle for differential accumulation: with diamonds themselves; with potential and actual diamond buyers; with governments; and, with families, especially the Oppenheimer family that controlled De Beers for over 80 years.
Open Access
Athletic Labour, Spectatorship, and Social Reproduction in the World of Professional Hockey
(2016-09-20) Kalman-Lamb, Nathan; Abdel-Shehid, Gamal
Existing literature in the sociology of sport largely omits any discussion of the relation between the spectator and athlete in professional and high performance sport. This dissertation explores that relation, demonstrating that exploitation in athletic labour and the enduring allure of sport as spectacle are inextricably linked as part of a broader political economy. The labour of professional athletes is theorized as a form of social reproductive labour that offers affective/subjective renewal for fans. Spectators who experience isolation and alienation in their day-to-day lives as capitalist subjects come to sport seeking a sense of meaning, connection, and community. Athletic labour in professional sport provides this to them and enables them to continue to function as productive capitalist subjects by serving as an armature upon which an imagined athletic community of fans can be built. However, for social reproduction to occur for fans, athletes must sacrifice their bodies completely in the performance of their labour. It is only through this sacrifice that the imagined athletic community becomes concretized as something tangible and real and spectators become willing to spend their money on sports fandom. This theoretical understanding of athletic labour and spectatorship is explored through semi-structured qualitative interviews with eight former professional hockey players and eight spectators of sport. The testimony of former players consistently links the political economy of professional sport and the harm and exploitation they experienced in the course of their work. The testimony of spectators, on the other hand, typically fails to acknowledge that the meaning and pleasure derived from watching professional sport is predicated on the destruction of athletic bodies. This study ultimately suggests that a form of alienation exists between athletes and spectators. The spectator grasps for an elusive sense of community within a society structured to deny that form of connection by placing vicarious investment in the bodies of athletes. Yet, this act of investment instrumentalizes and commodifies the athlete. Athletes understand this process as it occurs because it denies them their humanity by transforming them into something both more (the heroic vessel) and less (the abject failure) than human.
Open Access
What Makes Hollywood Run? Capitalist Power, Risk and the Control of Social Creativity
(2016-09-20) McMahon, James Andrew; McMahon, James Andrew; Nitzan, Jonathan
This dissertation combines an interest in political economy, political theory and cinema to offer an answer about the pace of the Hollywood film business and its general modes of behaviour. More specifically, this dissertation seeks to find out how the largest Hollywood firms attempt to control social creativity such that the art of filmmaking and its related social relations under capitalism do not become financial risks in the pursuit of profit. Controlling the ways people make or watch films, the thesis argues, is an institutional facet of capitalist power. Capitalist powerthe ability to control, modify and, sometimes, limit social creation through the rights of ownershipis the foundation of capital accumulation. For the Hollywood film business, capitalist power is about the ability of business concerns to set the terms that mould the future of cinema. The overall objective of Part I is to outline and rectify some of the methodological problems that obscure our understanding of how capital is accumulated from culture. Marxism stands as the theoretical foil for this argument. Because Marxism defines capital such that only economic activity can create value, it needs to clearly distinguish between economics and politicsyet this is a distinction it is ultimately unable to make. With this backdrop in mind, Part I introduces the capital-as-power approach and uses it as a foundation to an alternative political economic theory of capitalism. The capital-as-power approach views capital not as an economic category, but as a category of power. Consequently, this approach reframes the accumulation of capital as a power process. Part II focuses on the Hollywood film business. It investigates how and to what extent major filmed entertainment attempts to accumulate capital by lowering its risk. The process of lowering risk has characterized Hollywoods orientation toward the social-historical character of cinema and mass culture. This push to lower risk has been most apparent since the 1980s. In recent decades, major filmed entertainment has used its oligopolistic control of distribution to institute an order of cinema based on several key strategies: saturation booking, blockbuster cinema and high-concept filmmaking.
Open Access
"We'll Sail Like Columbus": Race, Indigeneity, Settler Colonialism, and the Making of South Asian Diasporas in Canada
(2016-11-25) Upadhyay, Nishant; Nijhawan, Shobna
This dissertation is an interrogation of colonial and racial formations in the making of white settler states. Through an intersectional and transnational exploration of proximities between South Asians and Indigenous peoples in Canada, the dissertation unravels South Asian complicities in ongoing processes of colonization of Indigenous peoples and lands. Theorizing pernicious continuitiesoverlapping experiences of racism and colonialism between Indigenous peoples and South Asiansthe dissertation studies complexities, complicities, and incommensurabilities in the making of racialized diasporas. However, it argues that varying loci of power and privilege render these complicities ambiguous, entwined, and invisible. Deploying traces as a methodological tool to study settler colonial processes, the dissertation explores the intersections of colonialism, white supremacy, capitalism, and heteropatriarchy. Further, while anti-Native racism has its own genealogies in settler societies, these grammars of anti-Native racism function in relation to processes of casteism, anti-Black racism, Islamophobia, and border making in the making of model South Asian diasporas. The dissertation draws from varying theoretical frameworks and research in Vancouver, British Columbia and Fort McMurray, Alberta. It looks at three sites of resource extractionlogging and canneries in British Columbia in the 1970s-90s and tar sands in Alberta presentlyas spaces of simultaneous dispossession of Indigenous peoples and racialized, gendered, and casted labour formations. In addition, the dissertation also conceptualizes colonial intimacies to trace desires between differently racialized and colonized peoples within settler colonial states. It uses multiple qualitative methods, including interviews with community members, activists and academics; oral histories of South Asian migrants; ethnographic methods; archival research; and analysis of literary and visual texts, and events. It also employs storytelling, prose, and semi-autobiographical writing methods. Overall, the dissertation centres Indigenous calls for resurgence and decolonization in theorizing racialized diasporic formations in white settler states.
Open Access
In the Beginning...Was the Act!: Zizek, Marx, and the Question of Form
(2016-11-25) Flemming, Gregory C.; Short, Nicola C.
In almost all commentary on the work Slavoj iek the question of his relationship to the thought of Karl Marx is either ignored or indirectly addressed in terms of his relationship to contemporary thinkers. This is best exemplified in discussions of what is ieks most significant contribution to todays growing swell of left-wing political theory: the critique of ideology. Against those who find its root elsewhere and who consequently offer various critiques of the positions iek takes, understanding the root of ideology to be the material practice of commodity exchange enables one to see the overall coherence of his work. After differentiating ieks position from many of his contemporaries and arguing that ieks parallax view can be best understood as a development of Marxs commodity fetishism the author goes on to use this as a means to get at the idea of form as it appears in Marx and iek. On this basis the last half of the study takes up contemporary history and theory on the formation of psychoanalytic associations and radical party politics to substantiate the claim that while both owe their existence to capitalism, capitalism could owe to them its destruction.
Open Access
Towards Transformative Solidarities: Wars of Position in the Making of Labour Internationalism in Canada
(2017-07-26) Nastovski, Katherine Slavka; Bannerji, Himani
Within the broad debates about neoliberalism, neoliberal globalization and the declining power of unions in the Global North, there has been renewed interest in the possibilities of international and transnational labour solidarity, coordination and action. Drawing from Rebecca Johns (1998) distinction between transformative and accommodationist forms of international labour solidarity I argue that we need to critically assess how these practices challenge or reinforce global divisions of labour born of the historical development of capitalism. To this end, this study provides an analysis of the dialectical relationship between the dominant practices of labour internationalism that emerged within the organized labour movement in Canada during the Cold War. I examine both the challenges to and possibilities for building transformative forms of international labour solidarity today. Challenges include the philosophies of social partnership, racism, white supremacy and nationalism that informed the labour imperialism and accommodationist solidarities of the institutionalized internationalism in this period. I argue that the brand of social democratic anti-communism that characterized this institutionalized labour internationalism was shaped by the wars of position over worker justice happening on the national level and internationally between unions, but also by ideas of race and nation. I outline the lessons from these practices by focusing on four cases: Kenya, Southeast Asia, The Caribbean and Palestine. Finally, I assess the grassroots labour solidarity that re-emerged inside the labour movement with the rise of the New Left. I argue that the model of international solidarity they built, called worker-to-worker, arose from the goals and strategies of class struggle unionism and constitutes an example of transformative solidarity that can inform discussions about organizing international soldiarity today. Rooted in anti-racist Marxist feminist theory, my historical sociological analysis draws from both archival research and interviews with union leaders, activists and staff. I make sense of the solidarities that determined these practices by exploring the terrain of class consciousness in which they were formed. Situating my analysis within the social and political contours of class formation in Canada and internationally, I pay particular attention to how these practices of labour internationalism intersect with issues of race, gender, nation and class struggle, and how racialized and gendered class formation in Canada has influenced ideas of worker justice and responses to imperialism, colonialism and national borders.
Open Access
Quest(ion)s of Anarchist Power: Rethinking Power-To, Power-Over, and Power-With in the Radical Democratic Praxis of Consensus Decision-Making
(2017-07-27) Hayter, John Matthew Kneale; Wood, Lesley Julia
In this dissertation I investigate the theory and practice of power in social movement organizations that use consensus decision-making, a form of deliberation that espouses radically democratic and anarchist political ideals. Over the past several decades consensus decision-making has grown popular in anarchist-inspired North American social movements. From the environmental direct action alliances of the 1970s to the recent Occupy Wall Street movements of 2011-2012, the consensus process has often been idolized as the most radically democratic and anarchist method of decision-making, considered as a way to remove or eradicate power from group deliberation. Contrary to this popular discourse, I will argue that we can think more usefully about consensus decision-making as a specific tool of power rather than a general ideal against power, but only if we understand power more carefully as an essentially neutral concept of collective interaction which can never be removed from any human social relations. In todays North American anarchist and radical democratic discourses the meaning of power is commonly divided into three separate concepts: power-to, power-over, and power-with. These three concepts are treated as distinct and opposed phenomena, based on a dichotomous theoretical opposition between the freedom of individual agency and the constraint of social structure. My contention is that power-to, power-over, and power-with should actually be understood as interrelated concepts concerning the dynamics of human collective action systems. Thinking of power as a concept that describes the dynamics of collective action systems, I ask a double question: What can the theory of power teach us about consensus decision-making? And, how can we study consensus decision-making as a way to elucidate the theory of power? Addressing how this double question can help to build a more careful analysis of power in consensus decision-making, I aim ultimately to contribute to the social theory of power as well as to the praxis of anarchist and radical democratic organization.