In Farewell to the Working Class,1 (1982), a book dedicated to his wife Dorine, André Gorz (1923–2007) offers the reader ‘Nine Theses for a Future Left’. Here, I borrow and play with this ...nomenclature for a series of reflections on the two volumes which constitute Gorz’s most personal writings and which book-end, so to speak, his oeuvre: The Traitor and Letter to D. A Love Story. More precisely, this is a viewing of the former text through the lens of the latter. The ‘steps’ presented here are not those of a linear path and progression but rather, like steps in a dance, move backwards and forwards, turn and circle, trace and retrace ephemeral patterns. In following in such steps, I contrast Gorz’s account of the self with another set of explicitly non-autobiographical autobiographical writings, those of the German Critical Theorist Walter Benjamin (1892–1940). Central to both writers is an understanding of particular traumatic experiences and past catastrophes, and an abiding concern with overcoming contemporary alienation through play and dance, love and eros.
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Sociology is just as much an art form as it is a science. And while sociologists and those in cognate disciplines have long experimented with their writing, the search for new academic forms and ...practices has acquired new urgency and potentiality. How we write up our research is of paramount importance: our language can be used in experimental and innovative ways to offer nuanced, critical commentary without foreclosing alternative viewpoints, and without excluding others from dialogue. Sociography offers spaces for new sensibilities and sensitivities; unresolved or incomplete argument; multiple, multi-dimensional and multiplying possibilities: for writing differently. As an intervention in writing the social, our collection works to resist the ideological promotion of dry, dispassionate, and seemingly ‘objective’ discourse, one which has traditionally upheld a set of dominant, privileged voices. And in so doing, our collection explores the potential of new ways of writing the social for both a trans- and post-disciplinary academy and a wider reading public; and seeks forms of writing that do justice to the critical curiosity that animates sociology. In sum, the challenge embraced by this collection is to argue for and showcase a praxis that activates sociological knowledge and enlarges the sociological imagination.
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Film maker Nuri Bilge Ceylan's meditative, visually stunning contributions to the 'New Turkish Cinema' have marked him out as a pioneer of his medium. Reaping success from his prize-winning, breakout ...film Uzak (2002), and from later festival favourites Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (2011) and Winter Sleep (2014), he has quickly established himself as an original and provocative writer, director and producer of 21st century cinema. In an age where Turkey's modernisation has created societal tensions and departures from past tradition, Ceylan's films present a cinema of dislocation and a vision of 'nostalgia' understood as homesickness: sick of being away from home; sick of being at home. This book offers an overdue study of Ceylan's work and a critical examination of the principle themes therein. In particular, chapters focus on time and space, melancholy and loneliness, absence, rural and urban experience, and notions of paradox, as explored through films which are often slow and uncompromising in their pessimistic outlook.Moving on from the tendency to situate Ceylan's oeuvre exclusively within the canon of 'New Turkish Cinema', one of this book's major achievements is also to assess the influence of classic European thought, literature and film and how such a notably minimal - and in many ways nationally-specific - approach translates to an increasingly transnational context for film. This will prove an important book for film students and scholars, and those interested in Turkish visual culture.
This paper provides a close reading and critical unfolding of central themes and motifs in Alexander Payne’s acclaimed 2013 comic ‘road movie’ Nebraska. It focuses on three key issues: (1) the ...symbolic significance of hawthorn as a threshold between different worlds (Hawthorne, Nebraska being the former hometown to which father and son make a detour); (2) the notion of ‘haunting’ in relation both to ‘importuning’ memories besetting the central characters and to particular sites of remembrance to which they return; and, (3) how the film’s pervasive mood of melancholy is subject to repeated interruption and punctuation by comic utterances and put-downs. In presenting us with a reluctant ‘gathering of ghosts’, a veritable phantasmagoria, the film articulates a particular sense of nostalgia, of a ‘homesickness’ understood here not in the conventional meaning of a longing to return to a forsaken ‘home’, but rather as a weariness and wariness at the prospect of revisiting familiar haunts and reviving old spirits.
This paper sets Scott’s original film Blade Runner (1982) and Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049 (2017) in a ‘disjunctive synthesis’ in order to provide critical analyses of both films with respect to ...some complex configurations of the body along two axes: bio-politics and the spectacle. We offer a reading of these configurations by focusing on the relationships between the human (organic), the non-human (android) and the immaterial (holographic); the eye (optics), the hand (haptics), and aesthetics; slavery, instrumental labour and free-play; the politics of bodies and of memories; the potentialities of revolution and the transmission of ‘tradition of the oppressed’. In this, we foreground two seemingly marginal characters – J. F. Sebastian and Ana Stelline. These ‘little people’ embody and inhabit the convolutions of Blade Runner’s ‘more human than human’ world through ‘free use’ of the body and playfulness which, superficially innocent, nevertheless bear within them the promise of radical political change.
In this introduction, we thank those who supported and contributed to our special issue of Classical Sociology, on the work and life of André Gorz. We then provide a sketch of Gorz’s place in ...intellectual history. Along the way, we explain some of our motivations for editing the special issue, then move on to a discussion of our contributors’ papers. We end with a reiteration of our goals for the issue, and with thanks once more to those who helped make it happen.
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Jean Baudrillard’s highly controversial book America (published in French 1986, English translation 1988) constitutes the point of departure for an undergraduate class writing project which began in ...2020. Students were encouraged to respond to the following prompt: what would an America 2.0 look like today in the midst of the Trump presidency? Here we have assembled and arranged the numerous fragments contributed by the students and the editors as a collaborative enterprise in thinking and writing differently.
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Taking as its point of departure Walter Benjamin’s repeatedly unsuccessful attempt to give spatial form to his past, this paper suggests that it is perhaps the contemporary French anthropologist, ...Marc Augé, who provides the most appropriate envisioning of a ‘map of memories’ in his brief writings on the Parisian métro system. For Augé, the labyrinthine subway network constitutes nothing less than a ‘memory machine’ in which lines and station names serve as mnemonics, recalling long-forgotten childhood encounters and experiences. Mirroring the cityscape above, places themselves unexplored, unknown, the serried toponyms of the métro become an incantation summoning forth the shades of the past. As Augé points out, those stations that provide opportunities to change lines are felicitously termed ‘correspondences’, a Baudelairean term that fascinated Benjamin and informed his key historiographical notion of the ‘dialectical image,’ the intersection and mutual illumination of past and present moments. For me, Augé’s highly suggestive reflections bring to mind my own memories of a London childhood around 1970. Looking at the London underground map today, I cannot but see the sites of many past meetings and partings, dots connected by lines forming complex figures, constellations of memory.
Une des premières incarnations du flâneur, comme l’a montré astucieusement Walter Benjamin dans les Passages et ailleurs, nous la retrouvons dans la figure du détective urbain comme a été conçu dans ...les écrits d’Edgar Allan Poe et Eugène Sue. Notre réflexion ici se base sur cet indentification et nous considérerons brièvement aussi les multiples incarnations du flâneur dans la signification de la flânerie transnationale dans le contexte culturel et politique contemporain. À partir de la série télé néo-noir The Bridge (Bron/Boren ) comme instance contemporaine du « détective urbain transnational », nous considérons trois types de trans-nationalisme : a) comment le noir constitue un genre transnational, une migration à travers les frontières ; b) comment le format/produit médiatique peut être engagé, désengagé, et réengagé dans un nouveau et différent contexte transnational comme part de l’industrie culturelle globale ; c) comme le détective noir oscille entre deux villes dans les pays voisins comme part de leur investigation.Nous terminerons avec une réflexion sur comment le pont – le vrai symbole du transnationalisme – forme un site marginal et liminal, un « non-lieu » et un seul ou un « espace-qui-est-entre » (le Zwischenraum de Kracauer) et ainsi génère le transnational flâneur comme détective pas autant comme maison mais comme hanter , a lieu d’un habituel retour et d’une mélancolie inéluctable.
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