This is a personal account of being an anarchist punk rock kid in academia, a meditation on the entanglement of punk rock arts and activism with organisation studies. To illustrate this entanglement, I present some of my experiences with hardcore punk rock and anarchist organisation and trace how I believe this background in a radical counterculture formed and conditioned my work within organisation studies and how my academic training has influenced my activism as a punk musician. The article employs Donna Haraway’s concept of partial perspective to reflect on how I have not only learned to see and understand organisation through my lasting engagement with punk and anarchist culture outside the walls of academia, but also learned to see and use art as a medium for change. The article conceptualises punk’s fidelity to the otherwise, the ever-present conviction that life, society and, indeed, the world could be otherwise. In my experience, this fidelity has translated into an anarchist scientific knowledge interest, and when employed in the service of organisation studies, it has enabled me to see, think and study organisation from an anarchist position. To be true to the spirit and aesthetic sensibilities of punk, the article is written in an impatient, erratic and fragmented style.
New social ordersI live close to Christiania, the self-proclaimed Copenhagen freetown that has sustained itself for 51 years and which is featured in The Future is Now as an exemplary empirical case of prefigurative politics in practice. Though I know the history and culture of Christiania, I never considered it to be a community established with a prefigurative intent. After reading the book, I know better.Lara Monticelli has edited a neat 241-page book that assembles cutting-edge contributions from 23 scholars. It is divided into three parts that sets the context for, describes the practices of, and present reflections on researching prefigurative politics. The afterword by Davina Cooper asks, among other things: "what is being prefigured?" (p. 230). In a sense, the foreword by Arturo Escobar is a reply: "throughout this volume's chapters . . . prefigurative politics is amply shown to involve not only a struggle against both capitalism and the state, and the multiple forms of power and material-semiotic arrangement of everyday life they deploy, but a diverse set of political experiments to bring about new social orders" (p. xxiii, my emphasis). Chapters are short, to the point, like a good hardcore punk rock tune and, indeed, the book reminds me of a high-quality anarchist A 'zine like Inside Front or Maximum rock'n'roll (which, to be sure, is a good thing). Critique of prefigurative reasonIf in doubt, then observe. At the back of the book cover, prefigurative politics is aptly summarized as the act of "envisioning alternative futures," and The Future is Now is subtitled an "introduction to prefigurative politics." However, this book can be observed to produce a critique of prefigurative political reason, in the Kantian sense, as it sets and establishes the limits of the validity of prefigurative reason. What kind of reason might that be? While Kant's critiques asked: "what can I know?"; "what must I do?"; and "what can I hope for?", the present salient questions are either "what imagined future social order may I enact?" or "what is the future social order immanent to my present agency?" The questions are substantially different but reflect prefigurative reason all the same. At the heart of the matter lies the problem of living today the life that you wish would be the life tomorrow, speaking in future perfect: when the new order has been established, some of us will have already experienced it. Bergson (2007) analyzed this problem in The Possible and the Real (p. 73ff): whenever something profoundly new happens, its possibility is born too and is projected back in time. Even if we could hitherto
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Boyar ins bogUnheroic Conduct. The Rise of Heterosexuality and the Invention of the Jewish Man er et omfangsrigt advokatur for queer-perspektivet som et utopisk håb for en verden uden fallocentrisme og kolonialisme. Den jødiske mand, som både antisemitismen og zionismen foragter, fungerer som et lysende eksempel på en ufrivillig queer, en negativ stereotyp, som påtages og påkaldes som en frigørende modsaetning. Boyarins taenkning hjemsøges af den frigørende modsaetnings modsaetningsfyldthed i spørgsmål om, hvordan man frakaster sig maskuliniteten, kønnet og navigerer mellem at vaere sig selv (singulaer) og høre til (partikulaer). I dette essay lader vi vores tanker flyde med Boyarins bestraebelser på saerlige nedslag i konflikten mellem det singulaere og det partikulaere; mellem jødedom og zionisme. Undervejs håber vi på at udfolde og indvinkle aspekter af queer-teoriens muligheder og umuligheder.
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