Idolatry is a consistent preoccupation across John Lyly's theatrical work. Beginning with an acknowledgement that idolatry had a broad meaning in the early modern period, this thesis highlights those ...themes in Lyly's drama relevant to idolatry and their significance to his wider narratives. I show that accusations of idolatry typically involve the claim that an idolater has mistaken one item in a conceptual binary for its opposite; I describe these conceptual pairings as iconoclastic binaries. I demonstrate that Lyly's plays mobilise and deconstruct these binaries, exposing their normative and contradictory nature. I consider a variety of such pairings, including man/god, true/false, nature/convention, and person/thing. Moreover, I demonstrate the intellectual lineage between the idol and the fetish, showing that accusations of fetishism rely upon the same conceptual binaries employed by Judeo-Christian iconoclasts. As such, Lyly's plays constitute excellent critiques of the binaries historically associated with both idolatry and fetishism. I foreground the Marxist conception of the fetish, precisely because recent materialist scholarship has become sensitive to the normative, exclusionary, and untenable nature of traditional Marxism. In short, my original contribution to knowledge is twofold: I provide a new, illuminating perspective upon Lyly's themes, and I show how Lyly's work can be used to explore and illustrate currents within contemporary ideological thought.
This paper will re‐examine and reflect critically Henk van Houtum and Ton van Naerssen’s paper ‘Bordering, Ordering and Othering’ that came out in a related theme issue in TESG in 2002. My first goal ...is to contextualise their paper into the debates on borders/bordering that began to flourish at the turn of the millennium and have emerged since then. I will then evaluate the enduring significance of this text and discuss the geohistory of othering. My final intention is to push their ideas further and to problematise the processes of bordering, ordering and othering as ideological and material manifestations of socio‐spatial fetishism that often conceal power relations and the alternatives for challenging and transcending these processes.
Border studies are today an increasingly dynamic multidisciplinary research field. This paper has reexamined and reflected critically Henk van Houtum and Ton van Naerssen's paper ‘Bordering, Ordering and Othering’ that was published in a related theme issue in TESG in 2002.Their widely cited paper contributed to the strengthening of new multidisciplinary perspectives by analyzing various forms of bordering and othering and by opening new horizons on transnationalism in the ever more mobile world. Transnational processes have led to the blurring of international and urban/local borders.
The use of the categories 'refugee' and 'migrant' to differentiate between those on the move and the legitimacy, or otherwise, of their claims to international protection has featured strongly during ...Europe's 'migration crisis' and has been used to justify policies of exclusion and containment. Drawing on interviews with 215 people who crossed the Mediterranean to Greece in 2015, our paper challenges this 'categorical fetishism', arguing that the dominant categories fail to capture adequately the complex relationship between political, social and economic drivers of migration or their shifting significance for individuals over time and space. As such it builds upon a substantial body of academic literature demonstrating a disjuncture between conceptual and policy categories and the lived experiences of those on the move. However, the paper is also critical of efforts to foreground or privilege 'refugees' over 'migrants' arguing that this reinforces rather than challenges the dichotomy's faulty foundations. Rather those concerned about the use of categories to marginalise and exclude should explicitly engage with the politics of bounding, that is to say, the process by which categories are constructed, the purpose they serve and their consequences, in order to denaturalise their use as a mechanism to distinguish, divide and discriminate.
Opinion Fetishism Stern, Alexander
The Hedgehog review,
07/2021, Volume:
23, Issue:
2
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
"Something once expressed, however absurd, fortuitous or wrong it may be, because it has been once said, so tyrannizes the sayer as his property that he can never have done with it." So observed the ...German social theorist Theodor Adorno in his 1951 book Minima Moralia. Although he was reflecting on the transformations of individuality and interpersonal relations in the industrial society of the late 1940s, Adorno sounds like someone discussing the effects of Twitter today, particularly the way tweets are taken as immutable expressions of a person's essential being. Thoughts tweeted in the relatively distant past are routinely exhumed to torment people who have risen to prominence. People engage in ritual apologies for innocuous tweets that offend overly delicate sensibilities. Some insufficiently prudent souls even end up losing jobs for tweets that are hardly controversial. While all of this seems very much of our time, one of the many unhappy products of our highly mediated lives, the provenance of Adorno's observation suggests that the distance between what we say and who we are--between ideas and identity--has been shrinking for many years.
The aim of this essay is to revisit Guy Debord’s critical theory of the spectacle as formulated 50 years ago in the ‘Society of the Spectacle’ in light of the contemporary production of spectacles. ...Debord’s arguments about appearance, visibility and celebrity are echoed in the way organizations increasingly focus on their brand, image, impression, and reputation. Yet, the role of spectacles in organizational life has remained under-researched in organization studies. As the boundaries between fact and fiction, reality and representation, substance and appearance become increasingly blurred, questions about the production and effects of spectacles seem more pertinent than ever. Are representations faithful mirrors of reality, or attempts to conceal reality? Do they replace reality, or bring new realities into being? By articulating three possible understandings of the spectacle, as fetishism, hyper-reality or performativity, this essay invites organization scholars to examine the organization of the real and the making of organizations through processes of spectacular representation including discursive practices, visual images and theatrical performances.
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