Job Rotation Meets Gendered and Routine Work in Swedish Supermarkets
10.1080/08038740.2014.990920<br/>Kristina Johansson
Archiv für Februar 2015
PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY’S RETURN
Kojin Karatani’s Structure of World History seeks to rescue the philosophy of history and restore to it the relationship between philosophical reflection and historical practice. This connection is particularly pertinent in Karatani’s case since he had earlier worked out the philosophical scaffolding of this monumental study in his book Transcritique: On Kant and Marx, which embarked on a “return to Capital once more to read the potential that has been overlooked.” By juxtaposing Marx to Kant and vice versa to discover the importance of exchange over production, he found what was to become the informing principle of his later philosophy of history. While Karatani’s accounting of the structure of world history presumes to recount the passage of the world’s history from nomadic societies to the present as a condition to rethink “social formations” from a perspective that recalls the form of a stagist philosophy of history attributed to Marx and Engels, he has abandoned its informing principle of the modes of production. Instead, he offers the perspective of modes of exchange, which means waiving any consideration concerning who owns the means of production: the putative “economic base” underlying superstructural representations like the state, religion, and culture upheld by a vulgate tradition of Marxian historical writing and discounted by bourgeois historiography as deterministic. The decision to shift to modes of exchange means rooting the primary mode of exchange taking place first in nomadic societies, rather than forms of production and archaic communal ownership of land. Although his revised scheme still accords priority to the economic, the putative division between base and superstructures still persists, even though the latter are still produced by the former, which is now the mode of exchange. Whereas Marx privileged commodity exchange as dominant, Karatani places greater emphasis on the earliest mode of exchange, which consists of the “pure gift,” associated with early nomadic social formations and reciprocity practices by clans, and seems to offer nomadic/clan communalism as a model that resembles Marx’s own strategic linking of the surviving Russian commune and contemporary capitalism. The point to this project is to transcend the hegemonic trinity of capital, nation, and state and satisfy a desire to share with other globalists a vision that aims to overcome the defects of capitalism and the nation-state and the failure of a Marxian expectation that nation-states will simply wither away with the final surpassing of capitalism. To this end, Karatani’s appeal to Kant offers to inject a moral element absent in the merely economic structure of history that will thus provide the promise of “world peace,” which ultimately requires an abolition of the nation-state as a condition for realizing a “simultaneous bourgeois revolution” that would finally overcome state and capital and establish a world federation.
GLOBAL INTELLECTUAL HISTORY BEYOND HEGEL AND MARX
Recent years have seen the growing prominence of “global history” as a subject of research, especially in North America and Europe. However, there is no consensus on what the contours of the subject are, or what the appropriate research methods for it might be. Further, there are quite a few skeptics among historians with regard to this trend. The appearance of a volume on the subfield of “global intellectual history” is an occasion to reflect on all these issues, especially when the volume in question suggests that “the future of intellectual history as a discipline lies in this direction.” This review essay, while appreciative of the effort to lay out the contours of the field, as well as to point to possible future directions for research and reflection, is nevertheless somewhat critical of the actual execution of the project. It is found to be lacking in chronological depth, and also highly uneven in quality, as well as excessively centered on a few “great thinkers” such as Hegel and Marx. A greater attention to the centuries between 1500 and 1800, when a polycentric global regime of knowledge (however tenuous it proved) was established, would have been particularly helpful. Most important, there is the question of whether a history claiming to be “global,” as distinct from “universal,” should not pay closer attention to questions of space and geography.
REIMAGINING REPRESSION: NEW CENSORSHIP THEORY AND AFTER
Emerging from the work of Foucault and Bourdieu in particular, a powerful theoretical critique of prevailing notions of censorship and its opposite, free speech, emerged in the waning decades of the last century. The principal theoretical contribution, I will argue, of this “New Censorship Theory” has been not to overthrow the dominant liberal conception of censorship, but rather to bracket this conception as a separate and ultimately subordinate species of censorship. In this article I reexamine the development of New Censorship Theory, especially its antecedents in the Marxist critique of bourgeois civil society. In place of an exclusive focus upon state actions, newer conceptions of censorship have enshrined self-censorship as the paradigm and have seen traditional forms of censorship as secondary to impersonal, structural forms like the market. I argue that historians‘ qualms about New Censorship Theory stem from concerns over this erasure of the specificity of state repressive force. Rather than simply accepting the division of censorship into a dichotomy of repressive/authoritative and productive/structural, this article argues that no strict distinction ought to be drawn. Instead, investigations of censorship in the traditional sense must incorporate the insights of newer theories to understand state censors as actors internal to communication networks, and not as external, accidental features. By investigating the intellectual trajectory of New Censorship Theory, I posit a way forward for historians to incorporate its insights while addressing their concerns.
DOES HISTORY MATTER? CHARLES TAYLOR ON THE TRANSCENDENTAL VALIDITY OF SOCIAL IMAGINARIES
Since its appearance in 2007, Charles Taylor’s monumental book A Secular Age has received much attention. One of the central issues in the discussions around Taylor’s book is the role of history in philosophical argumentation, in particular with regard to normative positions on ultimate affairs. Many critics observe a methodological flaw in using history in philosophical argumentation in that there is an alleged discrepancy between Taylor’s historical approach, on the one hand, and his defense of fullness in terms of openness to transcendence, on the other. Since his “faith-based history” is unwittingly apologetic, it is not only “hard to judge in strictly historical terms,” but it also proves that “when it comes to the most ultimate affairs history may not matter at all.”
This paper challenges this verdict by exposing the misunderstanding underlying this interpretation of the role of history in Taylor’s narrative. In order to disambiguate the relation between history and philosophy in Taylor’s approach, I will raise three questions. First, what is the precise relation between history and ontology, taking into account the ontological validity of what Taylor calls social imaginaries? Second, why does “fullness” get a universal status in his historical narrative? Third, is Taylor’s position tenable that the contemporary experience of living within “an immanent frame” allows for an openness to transcendence?
In order to answer these questions, I will first compare Peter Gordon’s interpretation of the status of social imaginaries with Taylor’s position and, on the basis of that comparison, distinguish two definitions of ontology (sections I and II). Subsequently, I try to make it clear that precisely Taylor’s emphasis on the historical character of social imaginaries and on their “relaxed” ontological anchorage allows for his claim that “fullness” might have a trans-historical character (section III). Finally, I would like to show that Taylor’s defense of the possibility of an “openness to transcendence”—as a specific mode of fullness—is not couched in “onto-theological” terms, as suggested by his critics, but that it is the very outcome of taking into account the current historical situation (section IV).
UNDERDOGS IN DIALOGUE
The study of cultural interactions between Asia and Europe in modern times has moved beyond a mere description of mutual “images” and a ritualized assertion of fundamental incompatibility in the dichotomous tradition going back to the critique of Orientalism. Using “entanglement” as his guiding concept, the author unfolds a rich panorama of Indian and Germanic (including Austrian and Swiss) intellectuals in personal contact and distant dialogue from the 1880s to 1945. Their shared framework of meaning was the resistance to “empire.” The book ambitiously advances a broader vision of global intellectual history. This raises a number of theoretical issues requiring further debate.
TIME, NARRATIVE, AND FICTION: THE UNEASY RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN RICOEUR AND A HETEROGENEOUS TEMPORALITY
In Time and Narrative, Paul Ricoeur confirms the relationship between time experience and how it is epitomized in a narrative by investigating historiography and fiction. Regarding fiction, he explores temporality in three “novels of time” [Zeitromane]: Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann, and À la recherche du temps perdu by Marcel Proust. Ricoeur perceives the temporalities as homogeneous; however, in my view, the novels contain at least three different temporalities. Mann seeks a new temporality by ironizing a romantic time of rise and fall and Woolf configures a time we can call the simultaneity of the dissimultaneous. In his analysis of Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, Ricoeur explicitly dismisses a Bergsonian approach to temporality. In my opinion, Bergson defends a heterogeneous time that is apparent in Proust’s novel.
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THE LIVING PAST
It is argued that although this book will be of interest to any scholar interested in Croce, Gentile, or de Ruggiero, it will be of particular interest to those interested in R. G. Collingwood, for the ultimate focus of the book is upon Collingwood’s philosophy and how it developed in relation to the work of the Italian idealists. This is a subject that has not previously been investigated in any depth. Peters argues that the basic idea that unites all four philosophers is that “the past is not dead, but living”; but what distinguishes Collingwood’s philosophy from the Italians‘ is the idea, and its justification, that “the past can live on even if we are not aware of it.” Collingwood explored and developed this idea in reaction to the “presentism” of the Italians, a position that is most obvious in the philosophy of Gentile but that is also to be found, albeit less obviously, in the philosophies of Croce and de Ruggiero.
Without casting doubt upon the influence of the Italian idealists on Collingwood, it is suggested in this review that, as well as explaining that influence, Peters’s book also throws Collingwood’s similarities with Oakeshott into relief; by contrast with Collingwood, there is no evidence that Oakeshott ever read the Italian idealists.
Books in Summary
Quelle: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/resolve/doi?DOI=10.1111%2Fhith.10748