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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Written as a small tribute to David Frisby’s inspiring, pioneering work on Critical Theory and the modern cityscape, this essay explores a number of feuilletons and other textual fragments in which ...the cultural theorist Siegfried Kracauer expresses his enduring fascination with the French port of Marseilles. It is suggested that this city has a two-fold significance for him: firstly, in the vibrancy of its street-life, Marseilles is an exemplary, indeed inspirational, instance of the cinematic qualities of modern urban environments. It is to Marseilles that Kracauer’s 1960 Theory of Film is indebted not only for its first formulation but also for its central motif of the quotidian ‘flow of life’ to which the film camera must attend. Secondly, this seedy city constitutes the preeminent site of ‘promiscuous modernity’, understood here in two senses: not only as an environment of explicit sexuality and sexual activity/exchange, but also one that is ‘for mixing’ – that is to say, open and inviting to the most eclectic and outré elements. This notion of promiscuity as the continuous co-presence and curious contiguity of heterogeneous populations and incongruous objects also has its filmic aspect – as Kracauer observes elsewhere, such surreal juxtapositions are also to be found off-set in the costumes and props of the film studio. In its fusion of everyday urban energies and extraordinary eccentricities, the cinematic city of Marseilles takes on a dreamlike quality.
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